The Future

[chandrew]

Max_Torque said:

And just as i was saying the words "critical mass", lookie here:

BMW-Daimler-Ford-VAG_create_CCS_netowrk


;-)

Yes, I saw this. It's very welcome as here in Switzerland and the surrounding countries the network is very patchy. For example there is no way I can drive from home to Stuttgart, the nearest big German city. Tesla put a supercharger on the route quite early on though there isn't any other fast charging.

You mentioned in an earlier message that the big manufacturers listen to their customers but they got EVs badly wrong. Their view that EVs would be small city cars (like my i3) hasn't matched the market demands, and given the relatively small cost savings you would get swapping a small efficient car for an EV I'm not surprised. Likewise charging in much of Europe is city centre and geared towards park-and-charge.

My experience with the BMW hasn't challenged my view that although they certainly have advantages in terms of manufacturing and vehicle dynamics they are poor in software. I can't think of a car which has annoyed me more than the BMW and as a result I'm highly unlikely to get another BMW in the future. All of the issues seem software related.

I do wonder how a firm who knows how to do electronics, especially software / hardware integration would tackle this, probably drawing on the expertise of a contract manufacturer. I suppose to some degree we see that with Tesla. It will be interesting to see how the model 3 is in terms of the things you mention (arguably with the S they didn't have enough money to develop a modern car). Certainly their acquisition of Grohmann would suggest that they want to catch up quickly on the manufacturing side.

[AW10]

gangzoom said:

I really don't get the fascinating with hydrogen, the tech is great but its just so pointless compared to battery EVs.

Why do you want to have a product that you can only refuel at a few designated fuel stations when you can have a battery EV that you can charge at home overnight for pennies??

Spare a thought for those that don't have off street parking - where are they to charge their EVs for pennies? EVs work very well for some but they are not a solution for everyone's situation.

[modeller]

AW10 said:

Spare a thought for those that don't have off street parking - where are they to charge their EVs for pennies? EVs work very well for some but they are not a solution for everyone's situation.

Once there is demand a solution will appear. Getting electricity into a street (lamp post?) will not be difficult

[caseys]

AW10 said:

Spare a thought for those that don't have off street parking - where are they to charge their EVs for pennies? EVs work very well for some but they are not a solution for everyone's situation.

Induction in the road, or when more common, fast 350Kw charges everywhere in public places. Check out https://www.zap-map.com/live/ to have a look at what's in your area. There might not be much yet, but as earlier posts have suggested, car makers have now realised it's up to them to create a reasonable charging networking to then be able to sell their vehicles. Locations will take up the chargers because people come and charge their car and predominantly spend money (Tesla tell companies that are looking to install a supercharger that it will attract people that will spend money, or stay at a given hotel / go to a shopping mall / restaurant because there is a charging point).

If a 3.5Kw/Hour charger gives me 10 miles per hour of charge, a 350Kw charger will give 1000 miles per hour of charge (ok let's lop that down a bit and say 750?) or even if you said 500 miles charge in 45 minutes - generally (not all) people will spend one 45 minute period within the week at a shop/restaurant/outdoors location. A 350Kw charger (without losses) is roughly 3x the rate of a Tesla Supercharger (120Kw) which gives 170 miles of range in 30 minutes - so a 350Kw charger could in theory give you 510 miles of range in 30 minutes or basically 17 miles for every minute of charge.

My local shopping centre has 4 free chargers, both waitrose near me also offer 4 free charges, the local Uni has a fast charger which costs 9p/kWh (so that's what, 3p/mile). Fast charges yeah some schemes are not viable for PHEVs right now and are more for EVs because they charge £4-12/hour of charge.

Once it scales and more chargers are available, at house parking might not need charging - you can just plug it in whilst you're doing your weekly shop / out for dinner etc. Yes, there are some challenges with the power distribution grid for not only transit, but draw/store for peak periods.

It's still in it's fledgling stage, but so were general fuel stations at one point.

[anonymous-user]

It's also worth considering what we are going to do with existing fuel stations!

Currently, i'm going to suggest it takes around 5min to refuel a typical passenger car, and a typical large station has, say, 12 pumps.

So, if we increase charge time to say 20min, we need 4 times as many pumps, so we need 48 chargers and spaces. As the charger is relatively cheap, it's simply a question of a suitable grid connection (here hydrogen/fuel cells could be used as an intermediate load leveler to reduce peak demand) and suitable parking space.

[Prizam]

If we all get electric cars the UK will need a few more nuke power stations!

[rxe]

caseys said:

Induction in the road, or when more common, fast 350Kw charges everywhere in public places. Check out https://www.zap-map.com/live/ to have a look at what's in your area. There might not be much yet, but as earlier posts have suggested, car makers have now realised it's up to them to create a reasonable charging networking to then be able to sell their vehicles. Locations will take up the chargers because people come and charge their car and predominantly spend money (Tesla tell companies that are looking to install a supercharger that it will attract people that will spend money, or stay at a given hotel / go to a shopping mall / restaurant because there is a charging point).

If a 3.5Kw/Hour charger gives me 10 miles per hour of charge, a 350Kw charger will give 1000 miles per hour of charge (ok let's lop that down a bit and say 750?) or even if you said 500 miles charge in 45 minutes - generally (not all) people will spend one 45 minute period within the week at a shop/restaurant/outdoors location. A 350Kw charger (without losses) is roughly 3x the rate of a Tesla Supercharger (120Kw) which gives 170 miles of range in 30 minutes - so a 350Kw charger could in theory give you 510 miles of range in 30 minutes or basically 17 miles for every minute of charge.

My local shopping centre has 4 free chargers, both waitrose near me also offer 4 free charges, the local Uni has a fast charger which costs 9p/kWh (so that's what, 3p/mile). Fast charges yeah some schemes are not viable for PHEVs right now and are more for EVs because they charge £4-12/hour of charge.

Once it scales and more chargers are available, at house parking might not need charging - you can just plug it in whilst you're doing your weekly shop / out for dinner etc. Yes, there are some challenges with the power distribution grid for not only transit, but draw/store for peak periods.

It's still in it's fledgling stage, but so were general fuel stations at one point.

Buried in those numbers are some severe challenges.

Rather than 120KW chargers, lets have 10 kW chargers - the sort of thing that you'd need to do a guaranteed overnight charge. As I look out of the window down my street, I see 100 cars. That's a megawatt of capacity, for my street. Now, this capacity would rarely be used, but it needs to be provisioned, otherwise on some nights, you wouldn't get a full charge. That is a shed load of capacity. Likely to be a new substation (good luck finding somewhere to put that), and certainly not something you can wire into streetlights - we're talking 2000 amps at 400V. Sure, in the future we'll all be balancing power between cars and houses, and it will all be wonderful - but don't underestimate the challenge of getting there.

[Otispunkmeyer]

Max_Torque said:

And just as i was saying the words "critical mass", lookie here:

BMW-Daimler-Ford-VAG_create_CCS_netowrk


;-)

Yep spotted that today. I am currently applying for a job for a company that is involved with EV transport. Given what they do, and given what seems to be an looming critical mass..... I best be asking them if they plan on still being relevant in a few years because it seems the things they want to help achieve are going to happen regardless.


It never crossed my mind, but I read a piece on an EV review and the reviewer mentioned that it was a bit of a travesty that makers were allowed to enter the market with their own charging method. We've got CCS, ChaDeMo and for some reason Renault decided AC was the way to go.

Hopefully, charging standardisation is brought about swiftly.

Edited by Otispunkmeyer on Wednesday 30th November 14:16

[Piersman2]

AS I was finishing of at JLR last year they were just in the early stages of planning a new assembly plant... where two of the models will be electric. The main driver is that the battery tech means the cars can be sold with 300 mile ranges on the 1 charge.

One of the main barriers has been breached, the marketable range. And ALL the main players are now chasing the EV market. In two to three years time there will be a plethora of EV choice.

[caseys]

rxe said:

Buried in those numbers are some severe challenges.

Rather than 120KW chargers, lets have 10 kW chargers - the sort of thing that you'd need to do a guaranteed overnight charge. As I look out of the window down my street, I see 100 cars. That's a megawatt of capacity, for my street. Now, this capacity would rarely be used, but it needs to be provisioned, otherwise on some nights, you wouldn't get a full charge. That is a shed load of capacity. Likely to be a new substation (good luck finding somewhere to put that), and certainly not something you can wire into streetlights - we're talking 2000 amps at 400V. Sure, in the future we'll all be balancing power between cars and houses, and it will all be wonderful - but don't underestimate the challenge of getting there.

Hence me saying there are some challenges with the power distribution grid for not only transit, but draw/store for peak periods. I am just theorising here It's a megawatt if everyone's drawing concurrently. Most EVs you can actually schedule charge time - maybe for instance a distributed p2p networking between cars (IoT esq stuff) could ensure that they don't all charge concurrently. Heck my company does dabble in the concept of smart energy grids.

Maybe it'll be a substation need. Maybe it'll be supercapacitors and some sort of energy dense storage (hmm... batteries underground?) that'll cope with this sort of draw. I'm not an electrical engineer but I cannot imagine that these sort of requirements are an impossibility. I agree with you, this is not a challenge to be underestimated, but I am pretty confident that there are people with sufficient skills to technically progress us towards a point where this is feasible.

Things scale, things grow. Just look at computers and memory and storage, ok Moores law isn't holding up too well, but the amount of data storage the planet is using doubles in very very little time at all now, whereas in fact the energy density to storage density is coming down (price per watt per Gb stored etc). Generally I have found when power becomes either a constraint through capacity or throughput, efficiency is found either on the draw side or on the ability to supply. Cost not withstanding.

That any battery tech may advance so much that overnight charging will not be required - I'm not thinking Mr Fusion from Back to the Future but advancement in tech like Lithium-Air batteries instead of Lithium Ion - see here http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_g...

[rxe]

No its not against the law of physics, and it is possible in engineering terms. But, unless someone works out how to propel a car for a lot less power than we are using today, regardless of improvements in battery technologies, the energy still has to be found and distributed. Even more unfortunately, the peak of that demand is 6:30 on a winter's evening when everyone arrives home after work, at the same time as the domestic peak.

Now, it may be possible to smooth that with some very clever demand management - but the implications of that demand management do rather limit the car's utility. For example, the "system" may look at your calendar and determine you are working from home tomorrow, so you can charge during the day. Only you get a call from office/your mum whatever and need to use the car. Oh dear.

Briefly running the numbers:

311 billion vehicle miles covered every year. Call it a billion miles a day because some days are more busy than others

(https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/514912/road-use-statistics.pdf)

Plugging in a reasonable kw/m figure of 4 - you get 330 million kw needed over the course of a day. That's 330 GW.

If you assume that demand is totally smooth throughout the day, you need 14 GW of capacity needed, so 4 or 5 Hinckley Cs. If you're more realistic and assume that demand is mostly over night, you need 9 Hinckley Cs.

I don't believe we can build that sort of capacity in 30 years. I know it is possible, but I don't see it happening. After all, Hinckley C has been on the drawing board since 2008, and even the most optimistic plans suggest 2027 before it is working.

Anyone who thinks there is some major tipping point in respect of electric transport suddenly taking off in the next few years is smoking dope IMO. Or maybe they are better at building power stations than I am.

[herewego]

We already have plenty of spare capacity at night and most people will charge then because it will be cheaper. No need to plug the car in at 6.30 just use a timer so it charges when demand is least.

Edited by herewego on Wednesday 30th November 18:05

[rxe]

herewego said:

We already have plenty of spare capacity at night and most people will charge then because it will be cheaper. No need to plug the car at 6.30 just use a timer so it charges when demand is least.

Well yes and no.

Right now, the country is running at 50 GW. All the data here: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ That's pretty much "capacity" - even the nasty coal stations are pegged at 100%.

We have about 6 hours over night where there is material slack in the system - but if you move car charging to a 6 hour slot, then we don't have 30 GW/h spare. And if you only give people 6 hours to charge cars, they're going to need big chargers.

The big problem is one of convenience. The power data suggests that the only way to make it work (especially in the winter) is to say "charging between 15:00 - 22:00 will be very expensive, well actually 08:00 - 22:00 really. Fitting in everyone overnight will be cheaper, but still impossible with the current capacity.

Edited by rxe on Wednesday 30th November 18:17

[AER]

Max_Torque said:

It's also worth considering what we are going to do with existing fuel stations!

Currently, i'm going to suggest it takes around 5min to refuel a typical passenger car, and a typical large station has, say, 12 pumps.

So, if we increase charge time to say 20min, we need 4 times as many pumps, so we need 48 chargers and spaces. As the charger is relatively cheap, it's simply a question of a suitable grid connection (here hydrogen/fuel cells could be used as an intermediate load leveler to reduce peak demand) and suitable parking space.

I reckon we should just put a coal-slurry-fired diesel engine in a box with a big generator attached to it...

[babatunde]

Max_Torque said:

It's also worth considering what we are going to do with existing fuel stations!

Currently, i'm going to suggest it takes around 5min to refuel a typical passenger car, and a typical large station has, say, 12 pumps.

So, if we increase charge time to say 20min, we need 4 times as many pumps, so we need 48 chargers and spaces. As the charger is relatively cheap, it's simply a question of a suitable grid connection (here hydrogen/fuel cells could be used as an intermediate load leveler to reduce peak demand) and suitable parking space.

Look at it from a different view point, when you drive you always have a destination, which will have parking, installing a charge point which is basically an electric socket isn't that hard or expensive, remember that with destination chargers everywhere the need for very fast charging is much reduced.

Single use points such as petrol stations will basically become obsolete in the EV world. Remember when you took a photograph then sent off your film to be developed, well that's how our kids will remember petrol stations, city center ones will be quickly converted as prime real estate.

"destination chargers" are the future, be it home, offices, shopping centers etc, average commute to work is under 15 miles, so even a "current leaf" combined with destination charging will cover most of the population most of the time. There will never be 1 solution that will be ideal for everyone.

[herewego]

ash73 said:

So we need to increase our power production by a factor of 10 for EVs... not going to happen, more realistically EVs can only scale to 10% of demand. Better start solving the technical challenges with hydrogen; EV is just a stopgap.

I'm not sure about that. I think the current drop in consumption overnight would power about half the current mileage so would cover 50% of UK cars being changed to EVs. This is just cars mind not vans and HGVs.

Total car mileage 244 Gigamiles/365 at 4 miles/kWh is 167 million kWh or 167GWh

Current drop in nighttime consumption say 15GW over 6 hours is 90GWh

We won't want all the rest to be EVs but even if we did it could be easily covered by efficiency improvements in the use of electricity. However I accept this won't happen simply because the government has no interest in improving efficiency.

Edited by herewego on Thursday 1st December 11:54

[anonymous-user]

What people seem to miss is that just because the latest EVs can do say 200miles on a charge, not everyone is suddenly going to do 200miles per day, and hence need a full charge!!!

For the vast majority of people, with two car families, they fit into the following pattern:

1) Commuting to and from work, once a day - average distance is around 20 miles in the UK
2) Daily local duties - dropping kids off a school, shopping etc
3) Occasional, long trips - to see family, go on holiday etc


My EV uses about 8 KWHr a day. It charges on cheap rate, at a 2.4 kW power level. That's the same as putting the kettle on. And between 1am and 7am, our household domestic energy useage is effectively zero. So, if the grid can power my house during the day/evening, then it can also charge my car over night without any changes!

There is also a lot of interest in domestic generation from people with EV's. Put say 10 KW of solar on your roof and that power can help the frid during the peak day time industrial demand periods.

Then we get to private/work based generation. For example, Prodrive the motorsports company, has just installed 600kW of solar power on the roof of its new Banbury HQ. That's enough to charge all the employees cars during the day if they all drove EV's to work.

Remember, fundamentally, a passenger car spends over 75% of it's time parked somewhere. The time we drive it for is actually the minority of its existence.

No one is suggesting this suits EVERYONE. if you are that carpet salesman who drives their 318d 60,000 miles a year, then sorry, you'll just have to stick with that a bit longer. But for every Carpet Salesman, there is something like 1000 people who aren't, who do just a few miles a day and who will be well suited by current EVs let alone the latest gen, that reduce "range anxiety" even though they will never get used to their full capability.

[98elise]

rxe said:

No its not against the law of physics, and it is possible in engineering terms. But, unless someone works out how to propel a car for a lot less power than we are using today, regardless of improvements in battery technologies, the energy still has to be found and distributed. Even more unfortunately, the peak of that demand is 6:30 on a winter's evening when everyone arrives home after work, at the same time as the domestic peak.

Now, it may be possible to smooth that with some very clever demand management - but the implications of that demand management do rather limit the car's utility. For example, the "system" may look at your calendar and determine you are working from home tomorrow, so you can charge during the day. Only you get a call from office/your mum whatever and need to use the car. Oh dear.

Briefly running the numbers:

311 billion vehicle miles covered every year. Call it a billion miles a day because some days are more busy than others

(https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/514912/road-use-statistics.pdf)

Plugging in a reasonable kw/m figure of 4 - you get 330 million kw needed over the course of a day. That's 330 GW.

If you assume that demand is totally smooth throughout the day, you need 14 GW of capacity needed, so 4 or 5 Hinckley Cs. If you're more realistic and assume that demand is mostly over night, you need 9 Hinckley Cs.

I don't believe we can build that sort of capacity in 30 years. I know it is possible, but I don't see it happening. After all, Hinckley C has been on the drawing board since 2008, and even the most optimistic plans suggest 2027 before it is working.

Anyone who thinks there is some major tipping point in respect of electric transport suddenly taking off in the next few years is smoking dope IMO. Or maybe they are better at building power stations than I am.

The average car needs 7kWh per day. That's like running a hob for an hour, or a decent electric shower for 30 minutes.

Now spread that load out over 8 hours and you're drawing less than a 1 bar electric heater, or a kitchen full of halogen spot lights.

The only issue we may have is running a hob and charging a car at full whack. I could design a control system for that in about 10 minutes, and have it working in about a day using a few off the shelf components from Maplins.

Once you take into account the electricity used in O&G refining then the net requirements are even less.

[98elise]

ash73 said:

So we need to increase our power production by a factor of 10 for EVs... not going to happen, more realistically EVs can only scale to 10% of demand. Better start solving the technical challenges with hydrogen; EV is just a stopgap.

Hydrogen needs 3x the energy to make, and is a bd to store and distribute. It leaks out of everything, and would you be happy with a 10000psi fuel tank in your car?

Hydrogen is a dead end.

[caseys]

98elise said:

Hydrogen needs 3x the energy to make, and is a bd to store and distribute. It leaks out of everything, and would you be happy with a 10000psi fuel tank in your car?

Hydrogen is a dead end.

I'm sure I also read somewhere that some buildings had banned hydrogen vehicles parking in basement car parks, probably being caution of said pressure and also the explosive potential.

It's a shame as it's quite abundant in the universe in general. Maybe truly long term hydrogen will be used (I'm thinking centuries).

What someone needs to do is step up on the Cold Fusion / Mr Fusion stuff :-D