How long have we got ??

[powerstroke]

Until there are enough electric cars and vans to cause overloads and power cuts ??
Or will smart metering save us at the expense of people being able to go about their business ..
Will sorry I'm late the car didn't charge soon become a common excuse ???

[powerstroke]

Mouse Rat said:

powerstroke said:

Until there are enough electric cars and vans to cause overloads and power cuts ??
Or will smart metering save us at the expense of people being able to go about their business ..
Will sorry I'm late the car didn't charge soon become a common excuse ???

The UK Grid can produce enough power in the short to medium term.

The problem is local power infrastructure cannot cope with all the potential chargers needed.

Few of examples.

Most houses, especially on estates have a local supply and transformer feeding the area. These are rated to a diversity factor which is roughly around 2kW per house. In theory every house can have a 7kW charger installed hence at the moment home charging is fine… but you can see the future problem. Tin foil hat time, I honestly believe home charging will be taxed or regulated at some point (like hose pipe bans).

Tesla chargers. Using Tesla as an example. Around the UK you will see banks of super chargers installed at a services stations and such like. We might think, great, 12 Tesla can plug in and charge up in 30 minutes.
No.
While 1 or 2 cars maybe able to charge at 100kW plus, a dozen cars charging at once would limit the charging capacity to 22kW, 15kW or maybe 7kW per vehicle.

Installation of super charger is tricky. Most super chargers need a local 250A or 400A 3phase supply. This can be expensive to supply in a residential area or small commercial areas. ei Petrol stations, multi story car parks in many cases limited to a 63A or 100A supply.

While there are method to get over these problems (new utility supplies, battery storage, hydrogen storage etc) someone has to pay. Only at them moment with goverments grants is this semi attractive.

Unless the government standardises on a charging infrastructure and tariffs, BEV's will fail to become mainstream.

The obvious answer would seem to be the small scale local nuclear generating plants , less transmisssion losses and cost effective , so perhaps we could fit massive numbers of charging points in multi story carparks and build power hungry industries
in the same area as the generating plant ....