SteamyTea

Answered that above. How long did it take to get the UK, as a whole, electrified and on the NG grid? It did not happen in a decade. Some numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_Kingdom Is your current car as old as your old house? My old 2 bed house in Hertfordshire (1910 vintage), which was a similar size to my current place (had a much larger garden) used about 20,000 kWh of gas a year. When I moved here (198 vintage), my first year's usage was 11,000 kWh/year. Half what I was using up country. A very few minor tweaks to the fabric and much more analysis has got me down to 3,000 kWh/year. I also had a small Vauxhall Corsa, 1.2 automatic (1997) that did under 30 MPG running around and about 40 MPG on the journeys down here. My current 2007, much larger and heaver, but more comfortable and much nicer to drive, Ford C-Max does 55 MPG running around and 65 MPG on my trips up country. So vehicle technology has moved on, but not as fast has houses have in recent years. As for the NG not being able to cope with EVs. I looked at this a while back 2018, which is now five years ago. HOW MANY ELECTRIC CARS CAN WE CHARGE UP TODAY? Is there enough energy whizzing down the wires. I have heard people talk about the infrastructure needed to run electric vehicles, it usually centres around fast charging and the lack of places that they exist. This article will delve a little into this complicated topic and shed some light onto the problems. As in my other pieces on electric vehicles, I use a cartoon car that does 1 2,000 miles a year and uses, after losses, 220 Wh/mile. Now I know that some people will claim that this is unrealistic as a Tesla S uses around 350 Wh/mile. But the thing is, most of us that may change to an electric vehicle in the next decade, will not be driving a large, fast luxury car, we will be driving a small Renault or Nissan, or maybe even a Geely. Anyway, you are welcome to debunk my assumptions, as long as you show me your working. So my cartoon car uses, on average, 7 kWh a day of electricity. This is not a great deal in the scheme of things when you compare it to our national usage of 808,704,000 kWh/day. The problem is that we cannot deliver all that energy in one go for a number of reasons. If everyone was to get home at 5 PM, plug in their EVs and ick the switch, most of the country would be plunged into darkness. Well it might not really. What happens at the moment is there is a bunch of clever people who control our electricity generation and distribution, within very tight limits. This is the job of the National Grid. It does it extremely well and, in my opinion, very cheaply. What basically happens is that the National Grid knows, from historic records, what the most likely demand is going to be, they then schedule a combination of different power stations to start and stop delivering power. So when we are all asleep, there is little power being generated, when we get up, at around 7 AM, they switch on more power stations to meet the demand. At 5 PM, which is historically the time time of largest demand, they have everything going, plus a few ready to go in case of problems like breakdowns. Then at about 9 PM, they start winding down generation, as we all start going to bed. During the night, there are only a few nuclear, gas plants and wind turbines going. So if we did all get home at 5 PM and expect out cars to be charged, it would happen. The cost would be high though as we would need to put more generation capacity to work, plus some new ones, just to charge our cars up. The thing is, we don’t, at the moment, all have EVs. Very few of us do. So rather than work on what can be done today, I decided to look at what could have be done, without changing the amount of electrical generation we already have. To do this I simply looked at the maximum demand on any day. Knowing this is an achievable amount, as we have already done it, I then looked at how much spare capacity there was the rest of the day. After analysing every hour of generation from the beginning of 201 2 to the end of 201 8, establishing the maximum demands, I then took away the maximum demand of the remaining hours of the day. This gave me a conservative estimate of what can be reliably and relatively cheaply delivered. Then I had to look at the practicalities of charging EVs. Most of us don’t drive very much. Our cars are parked up, usually by our houses for most of the time. I know there are some people that drive tens of thousands of mile a year, I used to be one. But this is not the market for EVs, they will buy combustion engined vehicles for the foreseeable future. Accepting that our cars have plenty of time to be charged up, usually over night, I calculated that you need 3 hours to charge the cartoon car with the 7 kWh that is needed a day. This can be done from a normal 1 3 Amp, 230V electrical outlet (they can only deliver a constant 1 0 amps). Because of this, no new infrastructure is needed for most people. Now I know that if you live in a flat, in the centre of a large city, you cannot park your car next to the top floor window. But you probably don’t have a car if you live in a city centre. I cannot account for all vehicle owners. Most of use can park pretty close to an electrical outlet, and anyway, as you shall see later, we cannot run every vehicle on electricity. Now, if you do accept that most people could charge a car up at night, we can look at doing that. Luckily we already have some good information about electrical energy usage at night. We call this Economy 7, and it is what heats water and homes for about 7% of the UK's population. 7% is about 2,000,000 homes. What happens with E7 is that at midnight, every day, a radio signal is sent out that flicks a switch in the electrical meter to tell it to charge less, around 9p/kWh. Then at 7 AM, another signal is sent out to reset the meter to day rate and the charge goes up to around 20p/kWh. Normal electricity is about 1 6p/kWh. The idea is that when there is spare capacity at night, it is better to sell it on cheap than turn the power station off, and then on again in the morning. If you are canny like me, you can get your usage to 90% on the night rate, at 9p/kWh, and only a tiny bit at the high day rate. This is great for charging up an EV, except if too many people tried to charge up cars, water and their homes, there may not be enough generation. This would mean that more needs to be brought on line. This costs more and the price advantage would vanish. But luckily, most homes only need about 3 to 4 hours of E7 period, and most usage happens in the first hours after midnight, not the last. This means that car charging could be delayed till the last 3 or 4 hours. All that is needed is a secondary timer switch on the extension lead, or if we want to get clever, a time delay of 3 hours after the midnight radio signal. This gives us a window of around 4 hours to charge up our electric cars at home, plenty of time to pump in the average 7 kWh needed. I have decided to call this period, within the E7 timings, E4. One other thing I did was to make sure that there was no more than one day a year that was unable to supply enough power. This has made for an interesting quirk. As our demand for electricity has declined in the last few year, mainly because of energy efficiency measures and warmer weather, even allowing for the unseasonally cold weather in 201 7, my methodology shows a decline in spare capacity. This is really a quirk in analysis and not a fundamental problem in electricity supply. It would be fairly easy for the UK to add extra supply from the existing capacity by just running some gas powered power plants for longer or reconnecting windturbines that have been disconnected for balancing reasons. Explaining balancing would take a much longer article than this, but just remember too much generation is a problem, it pushes the voltage and frequency up, something we don’t want to do. So how many cars could we have connected, on average, to our existing electrical system over the last seven years. There are three answers to this, the first is the minimum, using the E4 time window and comes out at 3.1 6 million cars. The second figure is for the full E7 time window and is 5.32 million cars. Finally, if we can charge all day, anytime we like, then we can connect up 9.29 million cars. As we have about 200,000 EVs registered in the UK, hopefully this article shows that for the next few years we do not have a problem charging them, and we can, if we wish, charge them up at 0.45p/mile. Worth considering and remembering that if someone says we do not have the capacity to charge up electric cars, they are talking bollocks.

Milli Hertz ?

The Guardian is trying. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/11/blending-hydrogen-gas-heating-add-almost-200-uk-bills

Having less caravans on the roads would improve my motoring experience. I don't really see what you are getting at. You say you cannot afford an EV, but can you afford, or at least willing to pay for, any car that costs the same as a Zoe, around £30,000. I bought my last new car back in 1990. Cost £11k. The updated model is now £21k. Edit: Just checked the price, seems it is £27k for the equivalent model, 21 was the basic 'hire car' trim.

Well that is true. There are no cheap bits of Cornwall on ugly ceilings, or beautiful Cornwall on expensive ceilings. Cornwall is rainy today, so really horrible.

Were Outspans. Not Jaffas, like @pocster

At those sorts of prices it is worth doing on most transations. If I have to take a rotten bag of oranges back to Sainsbury, it costs me more. (Don't think I have done a proper shop in Sainsbury since that incident in 2003)

Should have just fitted

That is a bit naughty. I wonder if I could buy a car and do the same, one of the online traders is offering 14 days money back. Buy a dog of a car very cheap, buy same model, swap plates and send the dog back.

It is the kind of thig that banks should be offering, but not at 20% of the contract price. Maybe 0.3% plus a one off set up charge.

My local Dirty Turks has just started charging £7.50. Still a bargain for the amount of flavour a calories.

Heard it on the radio yesterday. Odd I thought, do they think that all ICE cars have a mass the same as a Fiat Uno (700kg) and all EVs have the same mass as a Ford F 150 Lightening (3000kg). As for FC cars, looking up the mass of a Toyota Mirai and compare it to a Tesla Model 3. 1950 kg against 1847 kg. 2 minutes shows what nonsense is spread about. For comparison, a Ford C-Max is 1700 before 50 kg of fuel is put in.

What was that, I fell asleep. Or was it distracted by a raindrop on the cafe window.

Check with the forum bosses, they may have to deal with an influx of new members and spammers, and angry people.

And the current increase in energy prices is less? Investing in national infrastructure is not the same as one house investing in one heat pump, or one car being swapped for an EV. The accountancy is different.

May have misread the title. But always worth listening to on a wet and windy Tuesday morning.

We need @ToughButterCup to make up one of his tedious, but useful, checklists about checking up on companies. We wants/needs something to do now he has finished his build. @Susie and @Kelvin Let us know the outcome. No need to name the company, but it may show if a credit check is worth paying for. I used to know a girl in the 1980s who had a brother that was almost as good as mathematics as she was. She decided that short skirts, vodka and children from unsuitable sperm suppliers was a good way forward in life. Her brother, he went off to university (on of the Cambridge ones) studied mathematics, got his Master's and became an accurary for an insurance company. He said that it was dead easy if you have the information to calculate the odds, easier than bringing up children, and you get paid £100k a year for it. Now I know why insuring against financial risk is expensive, not the risk, it is the salaries paid to the staff.

Ohms Law. Or put a volt meter on it.

Yes, and often means people buy an over specified system. I do think we should sell, trade, and discuss energy by the joule, MJ or GJ, would save a lot of confusion. Some petrol stations still don't have temperature compensation on their pumps. That means you pay more to go a lesser distance. And if you listen to gas and oil traders they use therm and barrel. And often you don't know if the price is USD, EURO or Sterling. Jacob Rees-Mogg may love all that stuff, I prefer a simpler live with just 7 definitions. Length - meter (m) Time - second (s) Amount of substance - mole (mole) Electric current - ampere (A) Temperature - kelvin (K) Luminous intensity - candela (cd) Mass - kilogram (kg)

KW, kwh, and other combinations. Grrrrrr

You need to know the voltage that the lamp runs at i.e. 3V, or 12V.

You have done the right thing, twice. Always worth five minutes checking Companies House. You can track directors as well, see if they have a history of insolvency.

Just make sure your cheeks an are pointing into the wind. Will be just like primary school again.

Can be replaced with wee wee.

Dirt boy, that though never crossed my mind.