Charging points (rate of installation)

[Gone West]

Apparently we just have to build more offshore windfarms and there will be endless cheap electricity. "Endless cheap electricity", now where have I heard that before.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/24/offshore-windfarms-can-provide-more-electricity-than-the-world-needs

[Conor]

11 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

Pretty much all EV batteries are recycled, so their component materials get re-used.  Got to make more sense that pumping millions of tonnes of oil out of the ground, shipping it all around the world, then burning it and not recycling anything

 

I'd also add the the "in car" lifespan of current LI batteries is anywhere from 15-25 years. After that, they'll have another useful life of another 10-15 years as static storage. Eventually when it's no longer usable, 100% of the lithium and cobalt can be extracted. And we're at the beginning of the curve, things can only improve with further R&D. Compare that to the lifespan and recycling of an ICE unit...

 

The arguers against EV technology are beginning to sound like the typical climate change denial stuff. they conviently forget about the embedded energy in ICE units and the collasal environmental impact of oil exploration, refining and distriburion. IICR the embedded carbon in petrol by the time it gets to the pump is about 25% on top of the tailpipe emissions. There's more education required.

 

But I can't believe how rapidly things are changing... A year ago nobody (in causal circles) was talking about EVs... Now it's a regular thing.

Edited October 28, 2019 by Conor

[Jeremy Harris]

31 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Where to charge is an interesting one.  I am sure if I had an EV most of my day to day use could be dealt with by home charging.  It is when we go away on holiday or to visit relatives that fast en-route charging will be needed. e.g our short break last week was about 400 miles door to door. So both the outward and return journey would have need an en-route charge.

 

This is where you would think motorway services would step up to the mark and provide ample charge points to recharge your car in half an hour while you have a coffee and a break.  But what I hear is many of the motorway charge points don't work, and knowing motorway services prices they would be expensive (we actively try and avoid buying petrol from them for that reason)

 

You would think independent cafe's and restaurants that are close to motorway junctions would be installing lots of fast, cheap charge points, and encouraging people off the motorways.  Exactly the sort of thing that could work if there was a national directory of all available public charge points.  I presume some sort of directory must exist already? (if not is damned well should)

 

Destination charging is another issue. Where we stayed last week was a budget self catering and we opted for free on street parking. There was no public EV charging that I saw nearby, and a budget outfit like this that does not have off street parking cannot install charge points for use by it's guests.  It would be sad if owning an EV forced us to pay more for accommodation just to get somewhere with off street parking and a charge point.

 

 

Long journeys are the Achilles heel of an EV, for sure.  Ecotricity have a monopoly on all motorway services, and have an absolutely appalling reputation for reliability, plus they aren't exactly fast chargers, even when they are working.  Dale Vince needs a kick up the backside, and either booted off the motorway services network, or "encouraged" to actually install charge points that work reliably, and at a decent rate.

 

The reason that Tesla are doing so well, has a lot to do with their Supercharger network.  When you can just rock up somewhere like here:

 

 

plug in (no need for cards, codes or anything) charge up in half an hour whilst having a cup of tea etc, and carry on, then it makes life a heck of a lot simpler.  Coupled with a range of over 300 miles on a charge means that only one charge/rest break is likely for any long journey.

[Conor]

There was an episode of Fully Charged a couple weeks ago that featured pop up charging units installed in footpaths in residential areas. One possible solution. Another is fitting boxes to the side of the many millions of street lights. I think the issue is being a bit over hyped, the electric grid in Europe is ubiquitous.

[ProDave]

10 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

Long journeys are the Achilles heel of an EV, for sure.  Ecotricity have a monopoly on all motorway services, and have an absolutely appalling reputation for reliability, plus they aren't exactly fast chargers, even when they are working.  Dale Vince needs a kick up the backside, and either booted off the motorway services network, or "encouraged" to actually install charge points that work reliably, and at a decent rate.

 

The reason that Tesla are doing so well, has a lot to do with their Supercharger network.  When you can just rock up somewhere like here:

 

 

plug in (no need for cards, codes or anything) charge up in half an hour whilst having a cup of tea etc, and carry on, then it makes life a heck of a lot simpler.  Coupled with a range of over 300 miles on a charge means that only one charge/rest break is likely for any long journey.

That would be perfect if such a facility was widely available.  and I agree the motorway services need a kick up the backside to make it so.

 

I also hope the "VHS Vs Betamax" argument will be solved and all cars will be able to charge at all charging points.

[scottishjohn]

13 minutes ago, Conor said:

fitting boxes to the side of the many millions of street lights.

you  could fit boxes but would need different supply than the street lamp has

 

11 minutes ago, ProDave said:

plug in (no need for cards, codes or anything) charge up in half an hour whilst having a cup of tea etc, and carry on, then it makes life a heck of a lot simpler.  Coupled with a range of over 300 miles on a charge means that only one charge/rest break is likely for any long journey.

someone has to pay for it --thats the problem --cos you got an electric car -you can,t expect free power 

[Carrerahill]

1 hour ago, SteamyTea said:

And Australia, USA, Canada, China, Russia, and possibly Cornwall one day.

Not unusual to ship raw materials and finished goods, hard to think of anything that isn't.

Transporting by ship is probably the lowest cost, most fuel efficient and least polluting method there is.

There will be a report that shows different.  What reports do.

A million what?

It is still combustion, and often the environmental damage is still greater than burning fossil fuels.  Again, there are reports that argue it both ways.

 

There still needs to be an EV that does 400 miles between charges, but my car ha passed its MOT, it did need new brakes on the front, but they lasted 140,000 miles almost.

So what is all this

My car is almost 13 years old, and will last another year I hope.

Indeed things are shipped, but I am simply reminding people that this "green vehicle" has a high carbon footprint before it even comes into existence as a car, just like any other! Many of us understand how it all works, how things end up in our house or on our drive, how the fuel comes to be in our tanks, but most don't. I know a woman who is blissfully unaware that her EV is frankly just as polluting as my car for the first however many 10'000's of miles (she won't keep it past 3 years either, so arguably she never enters the benefit stage) but my car has a large-ish petrol engine, so she can't see past that. I am looking forward to getting the chance to explain it all to her.

 

Reports vary too yes, but if even if the claim is say 50% accurate, that is pretty good and required very little additional effort to make it happen - EV's I just see as a disaster through the additional infrastructure and waste associated with installing it.

 

I make the 10 year comment based on the fact that many cars made today won't be reliable in 10 years, you must bear in mind that many cars are not the well built Volvo's and BMW's and Merc's and Audi's, most cars on the road are little soulless boxes made of cheap steel and poor quality parts. Take many of the little EV's, their petrol counterpart hardly makes it past about 7 years let alone being a good reliable car at 10 or older. My point is, what happens to a 9 year old EV which needs a full new battery replacement? At 9 years old people will not spend £1000's on repairs unless the car is a higher end model or a pristine example someone just wants to keep for as long as possible - I can see plenty of them scrapped and who, for the foreseeable, will want an old EV car? Let's suppose you find a 8 year old EV with 75,000miles on the clock for £2500.00 - it might need a full battery replacement soon - so, do you buy it knowing you may need to spend big on batteries - or have to keep paying a battery lease on a car you bought for cheap. Possibly not, so many of the early EV's will be scrapped young and never be green. 

 

Yes I am sure the time will come when all batteries will be the same modules and we can go to Shell or BP etc. and simply pull out your battery packs, slot new ones in, pay for the electricity and drive off - much like Calor gas bottles they are checked before refuelling and can be maintained so they always stay good, but until it is this simple, and hopefully economical I think EV's will cause more issues than solve. 

 

What is interesting is that cars are becoming more and more efficient, but at the same time more and more powerful than it's 30 year old counterpart, manufacturers keep making them faster and with better acceleration, had they just maintained the sort of power that was available 30 years ago in a similar car but used new engine technology we could easily see far lower fuel consumption figures again so really we are solving a problem by creating more and throwing more money and tech at it all. 

 

My wife has a VW, when we first got it I looked at having it tuned, one of the tunes available was an economy tune, the figures still kept the 2.0 diesel in it's power class but certainly shaved a little of the 0-60, top speed and HP - but it was still about 2 times more powerful than a similar sort of saloon from 1990!

 

 

[Carrerahill]

1 minute ago, scottishjohn said:

Someone has to pay for it --thats the problem --cos you got an electric car -you can,t expect free power 

Indeed, but they think they should get free charges because they are "green". They also don't pay road tax but still use the roads. So now they are considering toll's  - so those of us still paying road tax will get hit twice! Just tax electric cars. Totally ridiculous they get free tax because their pollution has been deferred or relocated to the nearest coal burning power station. They have tyres on the roads, they use the infrastructure, they should pay for it. 

[Jeremy Harris]

27 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

 

someone has to pay for it --thats the problem --cos you got an electric car -you can,t expect free power 

 

I didn't mention payment, of course you pay!  The clever bit is that the account of the registered owner of the car automatically gets billed as soon as the connector is plugged in.  The secure billing data is transferred via the connector data line, with the car identifying itself to the charger, which will only start to charge once the vehicle identity has been verified.  It's much the same as the tags used for toll payments by regular users.

[Markblox]

58 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

last time i looked into this ,that  was not the case -will hunt again 

Actually after a life in a BEV the batteries can have a second life, as home storage for instance and then can be recycled. I know Tesla's Gigafactory in the US is setup for recycling. As has been said, beats spending a lot of energy to extract, transport,refine, transport a second time and then burn once with the resulting pollution. Change is good, embrace it!

[Jeremy Harris]

26 minutes ago, Carrerahill said:

Indeed, but they think they should get free charges because they are "green". They also don't pay road tax but still use the roads. So now they are considering toll's  - so those of us still paying road tax will get hit twice! Just tax electric cars. Totally ridiculous they get free tax because their pollution has been deferred or relocated to the nearest coal burning power station. They have tyres on the roads, they use the infrastructure, they should pay for it. 

 

 

Just to be clear, the road tax on the EV I've recently ordered is £370/year after the first year, so not free.  Charging at a Tesla Supercharger is billed at 20p/kWh, charging at home typically costs around 8p or 9p/kWh at off peak rate, so the only free charging will be that which comes from our solar panels.

 

All public on route charge points charge for electricity, usually between 20p and 30p/kWh, but it varies, as some have a fixed minimum charge.

[scottishjohn]

1 minute ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

Just to be clear, the road tax on the EV I've recently ordered is £370/year after the first year, so not free.  Charging at a Tesla Supercharger is billed at 20p/kWh, charging at home typically costs around 8p or 9p/kWh at off peak rate, so the only free charging will be that which comes from our solar panels.

 

All public on route charge points charge for electricity, usually between 20p and 30p/kWh, but it varies, as some have a fixed minimum charge.

you sure thats not just the first year charge ,same any car ,the first one is bigger than road tax,it sort of replaces the old car tax on a new car 

wht you going to pay next year ?

[Jeremy Harris]

2 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

you sure thats not just the first year charge ,same any car ,the first one is bigger than road tax,it sort of replaces the old car tax on a new car 

wht you going to pay next year ?

 

 

First year VED is free, from the second year onwards VED is £370/year, at the moment (may change in the next budget).

[Markblox]

1 minute ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

First year VED is free, from the second year onwards VED is £370/year, at the moment (may change in the next budget).

So you went for the model 3 I presume. What one? Brilliant car. What most people who diss electric cars have never driven one, far better to drive.

[SteamyTea]

1 hour ago, PeterW said:

Iceland to be processed as the energy costs are so low there to smelt aluminum.  

They have vast hydro electric plants, and a few geothermal ones. Environmentally it is probably better than using PV in Australia.

1 hour ago, scottishjohn said:

make them recycle it now and get correct pricing sorted out including recyling costs --otherwise you are no better 

There are many things that can be done, but often at a higher cost, both environmentally and in cash terms.

Companies don't choose to throw things away if there is a better alternative.

Quite simply, there is not the economies of scale with lithium ion batteries to make 100% recycling worth while. Why they are finding a secondary use for them as grid storage devices.

2 hours ago, JSHarris said:

  No different to all the thousands of service access covers we already have in pavements

Give the RNIBb a call and see if they agree.

 

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

Where to charge is an interesting one. 

They said the same about gasoline when you had to get it from the chemist shop. "Something for the weekend Sir".

 

[scottishjohn]

1 minute ago, SteamyTea said:

There are many things that can be done, but often at a higher cost, both environmentally and in cash terms.

Companies don't choose to throw things away if there is a better alternative.

Quite simply, there is not the economies of scale with lithium ion batteries to make 100% recycling worth while. Why they are finding a secondary use for them as grid storage devices.

which is why it should be sorted NOW-  not have dump in malaysia full of them 

[Carrerahill]

16 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

Just to be clear, the road tax on the EV I've recently ordered is £370/year after the first year, so not free.  Charging at a Tesla Supercharger is billed at 20p/kWh, charging at home typically costs around 8p or 9p/kWh at off peak rate, so the only free charging will be that which comes from our solar panels.

 

All public on route charge points charge for electricity, usually between 20p and 30p/kWh, but it varies, as some have a fixed minimum charge.

Do I assume correctly then you are buying a Tesla Model 3 or something of that ilk, you are buying from the luxury end, most people will drive Leaf's and Zoe's and what-not. I drive a large estate, a large Saloon and an old Defender, the two cars are flagship models, one petrol and one diesel - I sit in traffic and almost 95% of the cars around me are small cars - your car will sit in the top hierarchy of vehicles. The Zoe's and Leaf's and what not including the similar model ICE versions are all, just now, tax free, or very cheap. Why - there are far more of them, doing the miles than the bigger cars that actually pay to be there. 

 

With any luck your high price tag vehicle will last well and give you excellent service - the mass produced small car won't.

Edited October 28, 2019 by Carrerahill

[SteamyTea]

Think they are dumping them up in some Scottish islands to store excess wind power.

If we lived in an idea world, many things would be different. But we don't, so we have to let the global free market do it's thing.

[Carrerahill]

The problem with most things in the world is actually over-population. Solve that and all the other problems will go away by themselves!

 

 

[SteamyTea]

1 minute ago, Carrerahill said:

the mass produced small car won't.

What makes you say that.

The average milage in the UK is 8000 miles a year.

So even if half the storage capacity vanished, they could still travel 3 times the mean daily milage.

But I still want an EV that does 400 miles between charges.

[Markblox]

It seems to me that most people don't like electric cars simply because people as a rule don't like change but change is coming so they had better like it or lump it.

Legislation banning polluting cars from cities has started and will only accelerate. Incentives will be part of the carrot and stick approach but the goal is to clean up the air and the trend isn't going to be reversed anytime soon. A big cost but also a huge opportunity. 

From some of the comments you might think people like the taste of diesel fumes.

Welcome to the 21st century.

[SteamyTea]

5 minutes ago, Carrerahill said:

The problem with most things in the world is actually over-population. Solve that and all the other problems will go away by themselves!

We polluted more, per capita when we had half the population.

You have fallen into the Malthusian trap. And that is now about 200 years old.

Edited October 28, 2019 by SteamyTea

[Carrerahill]

Just now, SteamyTea said:

What makes you say that.

The average mileage in the UK is 8000 miles a year.

So even if half the storage capacity vanished, they could still travel 3 times the mean daily mileage.

But I still want an EV that does 400 miles between charges.

 

Many of the smaller cars just will not last reliably past a decade and that is the ICE versions with traditional technology. So these manufacturers are cramming brand new tech into these little town cars for as cheap as they can and we are expected to believe it will last well. The batteries may survive but will the rest of the car? They still have to contend with all the other issues cars suffer from. 

[ProDave]

If we (as a nation) were really concerned with the environment, we would look at car usage as well as car type.  Just changing for a less polluting car is not the answer, unless we also do something to reduce our car use.  I don't know the solution but travelling to and from work has always been by far my biggest usage and those are the journeys we need to reduce.

 

I am still not convinced "transport" is the big villian in pollution.  It is without doubt an easy target and a convenient thing to blame and demonise and easy to tax to the hilt in the guise of "solving" the problem.  But our previous house used to burn about 2000 litres of Kerosene each year, that is roughly twice as much as the petrol my car burns in a year. Yet we don't see domestic fuel taxed at road fuel rates and we (so far) hear little about domestic fuel usage.

 

We have "solved" the domestic fuel problem by building our new house to be low energy, so now the new house does use a lot less fuel than my car, so our next step logically now is to change the car.  

 

I wonder just how long before we really start to hear sensible proposals to really reduce domestic fuel usage, and that must be two fold, reducing heating requirements (better insulation etc) AND cleaner forms of fuel for what heating is needed.

[Jeremy Harris]

5 minutes ago, Markblox said:

So you went for the model 3 I presume. What one? Brilliant car. What most people who diss electric cars have never driven one, far better to drive.

Yes, black LR AWD, without FSD, but with the black premium interior.  Couldn't justify FSD, as I don't think it will be a great deal of use here for some time.  I also didn't think knocking just over a second off the 0-60 time was worth the extra cost of the Performance model, either.  I reckon 4.4s to 60 is quick enough for the lanes around here.

 

13 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Give the RNIBb a call and see if they agree.

 

 

Hard to see how they could have any problem with something that presents less of a hazard to a partially sighted person than a paving slab: