GigaFactory

Plug charging points in isolated areas will charge whatever they like

Diesel Transit vans will be running around the countryside charging up stranded motorists at 100 quid a pop

Edited By Ady1 on 14/07/2021 14:47:42

The ideal situation for home charging has to be Solar PV plus a power bank. But how many homes can accommodate this? Suitable roof layout and direction, plus it is a significant investment. It certainly doesn't work for my property. Sucking huge amounts of power off the grid is not attractive to me and if everyone goes that way can the grid support it? I already have a ground source heat pump, which is not cheap to run

Second point is whole life cost of the vehicle. I have an 11 year old diesel Saab. It passes the E5 emissions MOT fine and owes me nothing. I have no plans to replace it in the short term. I generally try and avoid cities. Locally Oxford is so car unfriendly, so I tend to use public transport anyhow (diesel bus??) I know at some time I will have to make a decision, but I am holding off as long as I can.

Interesting times ahead I'm afraid.

Whatever the answer is, it is not carrying on as we are today. Energy derived from fossil fuels is, over the next 10 to 20 years, going to cost a bomb and Internal combustion cars are only worth having if the forecourt price of fuel is cheap. How keen will anyone be to drive an IC car when petrol costs £10 or £20 a litre? Or more. Buying a new petrol car today is already close to being an obviously bad financial decision and it's going to get worse. Whatever their past virtues, petrol engined cars are not future-proof.

We've got used to petrol being extremely cheap, but since the 1960s - even ignoring tax - the price has been rising steadily, and it's going to go through the roof. Those with long memories will remember severe difficulties during the 70's due to sharply rising prices and long queues caused by temporary oil shortages. High energy prices pushed many British manufacturing firms over the edge, and killed the US market for gas guzzlers. (Obese cars too big for european parking spaces and sharp corners, with huge engines, soft suspensions, poor cornering and acceleration, doing 12 miles to the gallon.) Another fuel crisis on the way, this time permanently. God isn't making any more fossil fuels.

Sadly, it's difficult to imagine futures different from our experience, even though human history is full of examples of time-honoured ways biting the dust. They all do eventually. My grandmother remembered England before the motor car, when horses ruled the road, and steam pulled trains. 70 years later her childhood world was gone. Squires, grooms, ostlers, inns, trams, dreadnoughts, ladies-maids, telegrams, knife-grinders, sailing ships, gold and silver coinage and Music Hall.

Our future will be different too. Quite likely people won't own their own cars - they'll be leased. Remember Radio Rentals? People may not drive themselves either: we are close to automatic cars that can be called up with an App, take us wherever, and drive off to recharge themselves. No need to worry about on street recharging, though the plan is to fit all new street furniture with chargers.

The conversion will cost a lot of money, but when a country can spend £480 Billion on Covid, I don't think that's a problem. Again, remember what the UK looked like in 1970: masses of victorian brick built homes, mills and factories, slag heaps, factory chimneys, dirt, abandoned railway lines, canals full of junk, foaming rivers, and old men with lung diseases. Dreadful times apart from my psychedelic flares and hippy hair do. I've stayed in hotels just like Fawlty Towers. 50 years later, England is a different place, and it's going to change again whether we like it or not.

The big question is how soft the landing will be. Could be very rough indeed, because those Tree-B*ggers are so influential! In my opinion very sensible to start the change early, my fear is we have left it too late. Rather like a party on the beach having so much fun they're trapped beneath the cliffs by the tide. Will Lassie save them, or are the hedonists going to drown...

The trick is to replace unsustainable ways of maintaining a high standard of living with sustainable ways of maintaining a high standard of living. It can be done provided people get on with it.

Dave

pgk

My maths does not assume large numbers will recharge on the road at all, that was not the point of the post - I was trying to give some idea of the generating capacity problem we will face as large numbers of vehicles will require to recharge per day on top of current electrical energy demands, which itself will only get larger as more homes, hotels, pubs, resturants etc etc etc type premises increasingly cook and heat buildings and provide hot water by electricity.

Yes those with private driveways will probably recharge overnight, or probably when they get in in the evening. However, the domestic load increases in the evening as folk get in, turn on lights, boost up the (now electric) heating and switch on cookers, ovens, tv's, kettles and washing machines etc. at a time when one renewable generator - solar power - is not generating at all because it's dark - throwing more pressure on the remaing power generators.

The point I was making is that current generating capacity comes pretty close to max on certain days in the winter as it is. The amount of electric cars needing recharging each day in the future, not to mention increasing electrical demand for heating cooking and hot water, is going to place an additional heavy load on the generating capacity and we as a country seem to be doing very little at all to address the problem; it is obvious, we need more power stations to be built for the future as we go all electric but nothing appears to be being done. Soon it will be too late and we will experience blackouts as daily demand exceeds available capacity at peak periods; perhaps when that happens it will focus the minds of people.

Plus we need to expand the distribution system to recharging service stations and private properties to supply all this extra power, and again nothing appears ti be being done to address that problem either.

No-one is even talking about either problem never mind planning for it. We need to wake up.

Chris

Edited By ChrisH on 15/07/2021 10:39:02

Like so much else , I am surprised GB National Grid Status website is not taken off-line for the truth it tells.

Without the import from France/Holland , 'lights-out' is an anti-cyclone away.

Chris,

You made the assumption that BEV's draw 100KW. My large Tesla averages 330wh/mile at motorway speed in the summer (less efficient winter, but then the newer Model 3 is way more efficient again, lighter and 3/4 size pack gets it further). If my math makes sense then average draw will be 1/3 of your figure. Yes I can stuff my foot down and pull 300KW+ but UK speed limits don't allow that beyond play time burning off the lights.

It helps to drop your 128GW to 43GW with 10GW spare capacity at night (when cooking etc finished) - so not quite as desperate... a mere doubling of capacity and 20+ years to get there.....

pgk

I actually used 50000Mw as a base figure, not 128,000Mw. I also said you could play with figures up and down but it served to ilustrate the problem.

You can argue for ever facts and figures based on all sorts of assumptions but the fact remains we need a load more power stations to cover the capacity for the future and we are doing naff all about it.

QED.

Chris

A tyre garage next to where my motorehome has its lock up recently had to stick a pair of new tyres on the back of a fairly new electric car, The car has front wheel drive and had done just 8,000 miles. The reason was put down to the weight of the batteries.

And the cost of new batteries is a "How Much?" question, a bit of a if you need to ask then you can't afford it question! Never mind running out of oil, what about running out of the materials to make batteries?

Chris

 This video **LINK** about JCB may be worth a look.

Edited By David Riley on 15/07/2021 15:21:26

Edited By David Riley on 15/07/2021 15:23:38

My Model S weighs around 2200kg roughly the same as a BMW X6 diesel. Yes the battery is a whopping 540kg. How much does a 3L diesel block weight?

Oh, I agree that hydrogen would be way better - IF one could make the stuff genuinely out of renewable power without too much energy loss. Saving 1/2 a tonne of weight can't be bad. Certainly there's work in that area but a long way to go.

My garage had to replace the front tyres of a diesal van at 11k miles due to the yahoo driving it...My tyres are on 18K miles and starting to look due for replacement soon..

The pack is warranted for 8 years and around £30K to swap out. In the US several independents are now repairing packs..

pgk

I think the overwhelming theme that I get from the above postings is that a political target has been declared and nobody has any plan how to get there, I worry that our electricity infrastructure, which is at present fragile, will never be able to be upgraded to cope with electric cars and the enforced move from gas heating to electric in the timescale. I also see there being the inevitable “class” division between those in future able to purchase and maintain EV’s and those who cannot, being consigned to “public transport” it will not accord well with the current mantra of “levelling up” society, could be trouble ahead methinks. Dave W

Its obvious that some contributors are losing sleep unnecessarily.

Many of the posted concerns are addressed here: National Grid

Worried about the government doing something about it? Well that is natural, however the PM was on telly today and he did talk about battery factories a lot in his "levelling up" speech so who knows he might put our money where his mouth is and chip in.

Banning cars isn't going to happen overnight, its going to take ages to replace them and a lot of investment, just like broadband has taken 20 years to get any good - for some of us. Boris said almost the same thing.

I think the National Grid have a plan. I know Nissan do, Jaguar Land Rover seem to, how many plans do we need?

The problem to consigning a sector of the public to use public transport rather than their own cars for mobility is that public transport for those in rural areas is not good, services are few and far between.

Public transport may be OK in cities but for folk living in the sticks its not much good if getting to town is on a Tuesday but the bus back is not till Friday.

Public transport in rural areas seems to have been run down almost to the point of non existence; it's stating the bleeding obvious but to entice Joe Public out their cars onto the bus there has to be a decent reliable frequent bus service available to entice them onto.

Chris

Citroen also have a plan ! They built the 1905cc diesel I addapted to power a 20Kv.a 3ph alternator ! 15 years ago it seemed a good idea, now it's a brilliant piece of foresight ? I agree that whilst we're all being guided to electric everything there seem to be no new powerstations being built so wat will happen ? Noel

It’s getting hard to find a sea view without an array of wind turbines.

Mike

Never mind cities, I live in a largeish town, if I get back to the main railway station after 8:30pm I would have to walk home. OK it's only about 3 miles, but I won't be able to do that for many more years. People who live in metropolises, shouldn't make pronouncements when they know nothing about how the rest of us live.

One might imagine the public transport companies investing in all the tradee they are going to pick up as fewer and fewere people are able to own cars.

Well, we can imagine, but...

I live in a town whose local bus services provision is very uneven in coverage, with some outlying but large and growing areas having far fewer buses each day,and stopping ealier in the evenings, than others of similar size and distance from the town centre.

Oddly, the bus company, First, has been bringing in vehicles from Southampton (about 80 miles away) and Birmingham (some 170 miles away); still in their home liveries. It also runs our rail services, to London and to Bristol (the latter giving connections run by, among others, the German state, to much of the rest of the country). It doesn't paint "First" on the coach sides of course, but camouflage-names. Recently First has been cutting its services on both routes.

Its web-site's "Investors" page is illuminating. A couple of weeks ago, it proclaimed a price of £82 a share - eighty-two! It also carried a sentence, which when translated into real English seemed to suggest First plans to sell or close large chunks of its business for its so-called "investors".

I think a lot of areas of this country are going to be level in one respect... all equally isolated for any but their wealthy residents and the second-homers from Canary Wharf.

Like you Dave, having experienced it all - including a mile walk to a telephone, I'd rather not either.

The collective response from the forum then is to give up on emerging technologies.

Well said Duncan. I would take it one stage further and keep naive townies from influencing what happens in the countryside.

+1 Duncan