My big boat convered to electric drive

[Jen-in-Wellies]

56 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

I can only relate my own experience from when we had the house built 'out in the wilds' in 2005.

 

There was a power line / pole (not a pylon) 300 yards from where we were building.

We had to purchase (pay for) a 200 amp transformer, an additional 'pole' to be mounted alongside the original pole (to mount the transformer onto) and the installation of the cabling to the building.

 

I dug the trench myself, ran the trunking and backfilled the trench.

 

The leccy board installed the transformer, 'pulled the cable' and left the end sticking out of the ground for my Electrician to connect up to our 'fuse box'.

 

The cost of the transformer, additional pole, 300 yards of Split concentric cable, & pulling the cable was £20,000 + VAT

 

That was only a 200 amp supply.

 

I imagine that the supply for these 'fast chargers' (particularly if they are 'daisy chained' along the towpath) would run into 1000's of amps and cables as 'thick as your wrist'

Thanks Alan,

Current depends on voltage. What voltage would the 200A transformer be at? The idea of using fast chargers is that you don't need lots of them daisy chained along the towpath, just a couple for each typical days cruising range, so 2 per 10 to 20 miles distance. Assuming a 10 minute charge time at 150kW.

[Alan de Enfield]

4 minutes ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

Current depends on voltage. What voltage would the 200A transformer be at?

3-Phase 415v

Split down to individual phases in our mains 'fuse box'

 

 

[IanD]

2 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

And if the same capacity battery is charged in ten minutes, then the charge current necessarily goes up threefold. 

 

So to charge a 70kWhr propulsion battery at a lock in ten minutes, a truly massive amount of energy will need to be sucked from the grid in just ten minutes. This will demand really high voltage transmission cables or locally stored energy. Super-capacitor technology perhaps. 

 

All too expensive to actually happen, I suspect. 

 

 

But unlike a car you don't need to charge a 70kWh pack from flat in 10 minutes (which would power a cruising narrowboat for maybe 4 days), only top it up with a couple of kWh which needs a 12kW feed, this is a standard 415V 30A 3-phase supply. If you want to charge at fewer locks then the power goes up, but it's still nowhere near what cars need because their energy consumption is at least 10x what a boat uses -- and as I keep saying this *will* be solved for cars, boats are a far smaller problem  -- maybe 10000 times smaller when you look at numbers and energy usage.

 

Cars might need (some) >150kW fast chargers on motorways, boats simply don't...

Edited November 1, 2019 by IanD

[cuthound]

4 hours ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

Does anyone have any real world knowledge of high power transmission lines and the cost of getting it to a location and transforming it down to something usable by a charger? This is completely out of my field and I'm struggling to find it. Without some actual figures we are just left with people saying it'll be too expensive on gut feel. Bear in mind that this investment is already being made at places like motorway service stations for charging many cars at once, some in as little as 30 minutes.

 

Some numbers to work with.

@peterboat has 35kWhr of propulsion batteries in his boat. Charging from 20% to 80% will need 21kWhr, assuming no losses. This would be 126kW of power to do in ten minutes. Say a round 150kW of power to be drawn down the power line to charge one boat in such a short time. The fastest Tesla car chargers were at 120kW a year ago. Say you have to get 150kW on average a mile from a high voltage grid line to an isolated lock. Higher voltage means lower current, but bigger costs, so there is a balance point.

 

Jen

 

Yes, 5 years ago is was £1,000 per kW for an easy location, most locks are not close to existing infrastructure so say 5-10 times that.

 

A more practical way would be to provide moorings with charge facilities every 4 hours cruising throughout the system, preferably near existing power infrastructure and use slow, single phase chargers to charge bstteries overnight.

 

Would still require £££billions to provide though.

Edited November 1, 2019 by cuthound
Clarification

[MtB]

20 minutes ago, cuthound said:

Would still require £££billions to provide though

 

At £1k per kW, a 120kW supply to a lock would cost £120k.

 

Even if only 10% of locks had a charging point, that is 200 locations at an average of £120 each.

 

£24m in total. A lot, but given CRT's total budget not totally unrealistic. 

 

 

 

 

[Alan de Enfield]

21 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

At £1k per kW, a 120kW supply to a lock would cost £120k.

 

Even if only 10% of locks had a charging point, that is 200 locations at an average of £120 each.

 

£24m in total. A lot, but given CRT's total budget not totally unrealistic. 

 

 

 

 

 

The question becomes at what stage do they put in that £24m investment ?

Is it when there 100 electric boats registered, 1000, 10,000 or 30,000 ?

 

It would obviously need to be in place before there are '1000s' of boats as they would need the infrastructure to be able to operate, particularly if they are going to need to be recharged every day as they have only had a '10 minute top-up', that would suggest that charging points will need to be something like every 10 miles (average daily movement ?) apart so needing 2000 charging points rather than 200.

 

It will be a huge investment with little chance of a return within an acceptable time frame. (Remember that Electric boats are specifically excluded from the free-tariff charging allowed for motor vehicles) C&RT cannot recoup the investment from 'over charging' for the electricity.

[cuthound]

24 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

At £1k per kW, a 120kW supply to a lock would cost £120k.

 

Even if only 10% of locks had a charging point, that is 200 locations at an average of £120 each.

 

£24m in total. A lot, but given CRT's total budget not totally unrealistic. 

 

 

 

 

 

But depending on how close the nearest electrical distribution infrastructure is, and whether or not they need to provide miles of cabling, it could cost up to 10 times than. Multiply by a further 10 to provide at every lock.

 

If CRT go down the charging infrastructure route they will go for the cheapest option, that is multiple slow charges at say 250 visitor moorings around CRT's canals and rivers.

 

[IanD]

1 hour ago, cuthound said:

 

But depending on how close the nearest electrical distribution infrastructure is, and whether or not they need to provide miles of cabling, it could cost up to 10 times than. Multiply by a further 10 to provide at every lock.

 

If CRT go down the charging infrastructure route they will go for the cheapest option, that is multiple slow charges at say 250 visitor moorings around CRT's canals and rivers.

 

Still ignoring the fact that you don't need a 120kW (or whatever) supply to each lock, because unlike cars on a motorway a boat doesn't need to charge a flat 70kWh pack to full in ten minutes (or whatever). Charging for boats at locks needs to put back what energy they've used while travelling (about 2kWh per hour cruising allowing for locks, more than 10x lower than a car) and maybe fully charge overnight when you typically have 12 hours or so moored. NARROWBOATS DON'T NEED HIGH POWER FAST CHARGERS, their needs are no different to a house and millions of these manage to obtain mains power even in the countryside. Sorry for shouting, maybe it'll make people take notice this time... ?

Edited November 1, 2019 by IanD

[cuthound]

20 minutes ago, IanD said:

Still ignoring the fact that you don't need a 120kW (or whatever) supply to each lock, because unlike cars on a motorway a boat doesn't need to charge a flat 70kWh pack to full in ten minutes (or whatever). Charging for boats at locks needs to put back what energy they've used while travelling (about 2kWh per hour cruising allowing for locks, more than 10x lower than a car) and maybe fully charge overnight when you typically have 12 hours or so moored. NARROWBOATS DON'T NEED HIGH POWER FAST CHARGERS. Sorry for shouting, maybe it'll make people take notice this time... ?

 

You are pushing against an open door with your capitalisation.

 

Where we disagree is whether it will be cheaper to provide lots of sites with a few low power chargers, i.e. at locks, or a few locations with many low power chargers, i.e. at visitor moorings and how long people will be connected to those chargers, a few minutes or overnight.

 

How will a charger at a lock work for somewhere like the Ashby Canal where a boat travelling from the Oxford Canal to the Atherstone Top Lock on the Coventry Canal via the end of navigation on the Ashby Canal will travel 54 miles between locks - a long way to go on a 10 minute charge?

 

Concentrating the chargers at visitor moorings must be cheaper to supply, as the trench for the bulk cable betwern the nearest power distribution infrastructure and many chsrgers costs about the same as a trench between the nearest power distribution infrastructure an individual charger.

 

 

 

Edited November 1, 2019 by cuthound
Clarification

[Jen-in-Wellies]

13 minutes ago, cuthound said:

Where we disagree is whether it will be cheaper to provide lots of sites with a few low power chargers, i.e. at locks, or a few locations with many low power chargers, i.e. at visitor moorings and how long people will be connected to those chargers, a few minutes or overnight.

This is the big question and one we are unlikely to be able to answer on the forum. It would need a proper study by people up to date with electric boating, battery technology, high power electrical transmission and the control of big projects. Since it mostly doesn't involve putting up signs, I'd hesitate to suggest CaRT for this job! I'm sure they will come up with an excellent Boat Charging Here sign.

 

Jen

Edited November 1, 2019 by Jen-in-Wellies

[IanD]

30 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

You are pushing against an open door with your capitalisation.

 

Where we disagree is whether it will be cheaper to provide lots of sites with a few low power chargers, i.e. at locks, or a few locations with many low power chargers, i.e. at visitor moorings and how long people will be connected to those chargers, a few minutes or overnight. How will a charger at a lock work for somewhere like the Ashby Canal where a boat travelling from the Oxford Canal to the Coventry Canal via the end of navigation on the Ashby Canal will travel 54 miles between locks?

 

Concentrating the chargers at visitor moorings must be cheaper to supply, as the trench for the bulk cable betwern the nearest power distribution infrastructure and many chsrgers costs about the same as a trench between the nearest power distribution infrastructure an individual charger.

 

 

 

I agree that the problem is where to put the points, but compared to the far bigger car problem this is a tiny issue -- they can be put at locks or moorings or wherever necessary, the energy use of a boat is less than a tenth that of a car and there are 1000x more  cars. A 70kWh battery pack (same size as a car because these will be cheapest and widely available) will run a narrowboat for about 4 days, I can't imagine charge points being further apart than this.even on the Ashby.

 

Honestly everyone is thinking this is a big problem when actually it's a tiny one compared to the car one which will be solved. It's like IC design (my business), there's no way small companies like the one I work for (only

a few hundred million pounds a year turnover...) could afford to pay for a bleeding-edge fab which costs about $50billion, but we don't have to because Apple have already paid for it and we get to ride on their coat-tails. The same will happen for electric boats, they can use everything that will be developed for electric cars "for free" -- or at least not have to pay for all the development costs, and the installation and running costs per boat will be 10x lower than for cars because so is the energy used.

 

It's no different to people saying "petrol engines will never replace horses" because there are stables everywhere and hardly any petrol stations -- this was true when everyone used horses and nobody drove cars. The same thing will happen with the transition from diesel/petrol power to batteries on both roads and canals.

 

The big question is -- when? ?

Edited November 1, 2019 by IanD

[IanD]

14 minutes ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

This is the big question and one we are unlikely to be able to answer on the forum. It would need a proper study by people up to date with electric boating, battery technology, high power electrical transmission and the control of big projects. Since it mostly doesn't involve putting up signs, I'd hesitate to suggest CaRT for this job! I'm sure they will come up with an excellent Boat Charging Here sign.

 

Jen

It will be done but probably by one of the companies installing car charging infrastructure not CART -- they'd probably see it as an interesting problem to solve but trivially easy in comparison to cars, only costing 0.01%--0.1% as much to do (1/10000 the power demand over 1/1000 of the distance).

 

In fact an intelligent government (yeah, good luck with that) could make it a condition of them being allowed to install the lucrative infrastructure for cars that they also did the canals for free... ? 

 

(and then CART just do the signs)

Edited November 1, 2019 by IanD

[cuthound]

I agree we will hang onto the cost tails of the car industry for he development of chargers, motors and batteries, but the biggest problems I see for electrifying the CRT network is:

 

1. The remoteness of most of the CRT network from the power distribution infrastructure, which will incur huge installation costs, and, 

 

2. CRT (or any successors) inability to attract funding to develop the charging network.

 

It is the same chicken and egg situation as the road network is currently experiencing but magnified  by 1000. Many people are delaying buying an EV until a wider charging network is in place. The difference being that there are 30 million plus cars potentially to bevreplaced with EV's but only 30,000 boats on CRT's network. A much less attractive proposition to 3rd party charging network supp,here.

[ditchcrawler]

Well they have made a start on the Broads https://www.broads-authority.gov.uk/boating/facilities/electric-boat-charging-points

[IanD]

10 minutes ago, cuthound said:

I agree we will hang onto the cost tails of the car industry for he development of chargers, motors and batteries, but the biggest problems I see for electrifying the CRT network is:

 

1. The remoteness of most of the CRT network from the power distribution infrastructure, which will incur huge installation costs, and, 

 

2. CRT (or any successors) inability to attract funding to develop the charging network.

 

It is the same chicken and egg situation as the road network is currently experiencing but magnified  by 1000. Many people are delaying buying an EV until a wider charging network is in place. The difference being that there are 30 million plus cars potentially to bevreplaced with EV's but only 30,000 boats on CRT's network. A much less attractive proposition to 3rd party charging network supp,here.

Agreed. Make the car installers do the canals for free then as a condition of getting the lucrative car infrastructure contract ?

 

This is no different to many supply deals that have been done in the past, if they want the big business they have to do something community-friendly as part of it.

 

It doesn't have to be attractive to them, it's just another "cost of doing business".

 

Of course this assumes that our government is clever enough to see this as a way to solve a problem that they probably haven't even though of yet...

Edited November 1, 2019 by IanD

[ditchcrawler]

8 minutes ago, IanD said:

Agreed. Make the car installers do the canals for free then as a condition of getting the lucrative car infrastructure contract ?

 

This is no different to many supply deals that have been done in the past, if they want the big business they have to do something community-friendly as part of it.

 

It doesn't have to be attractive to them, it's just another "cost of doing business".

 

Of course this assumes that our government is clever enough to see this as a way to solve a problem that they probably haven't even though of yet...

Do you think our Government will put anything in the way of these companies installing their charging points especially making them pay anything, they will probably give them grants just like the companies that installed wind generators , paid themselves a good salary and then went bust .

[MtB]

3 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

paid themselves a good salary and then went bust .

 

And CRT appear to be pulling off the same trick....

 

 

[IanD]

5 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

Do you think our Government will put anything in the way of these companies installing their charging points especially making them pay anything, they will probably give them grants just like the companies that installed wind generators , paid themselves a good salary and then went bust .

The government might be forced to have closer control over the charging network than just letting the market deal with it. Unlike petrol stations which can be independently built anywhere, charging stations are going to need a heavy-duty grid infrastructure which has to be installed, so a free-for-all makes much less sense than a planned network together with the grid companies.

 

But just because this is the sensible route doesn't mean it's the one a free-market-obsessed government like the current one will take -- national infrastructure needs national planning.

[cuthound]

11 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

Do you think our Government will put anything in the way of these companies installing their charging points especially making them pay anything, they will probably give them grants just like the companies that installed wind generators , paid themselves a good salary and then went bust .

 

Indeed. The government (and it's predecessors) have an appalling record of managing big projects, even when offering subsidie to p companies to do something.

 

The SMART meter fiasco is a case in point, where all of the early meters were electricity company specific, (because the specifcation didnt ask for them to be universal) so don't work when a customer changes suppliers.

 

The government is now offering further subsidies to the same companies to replace tne SMART meters they originally provided.

[peterboat]

The big advantage for boats is that they can have substantial solar as well which will boost the range in sunny weather. So what Ian is saying is realistic, the chargers dont need to be superfast chargers, and depending on the size of the battery bank a 3 day range is easily workable for a narrowboat, my widebeam does require more energy to push it along, but not a huge amount more. I am more than happy with my conversion, and very soon it will have a variable pitch propeller which is supposed to be better for electric, time will tell if thats right

[Sea Dog]

14 minutes ago, peterboat said:

...very soon it will have a variable pitch propeller which is supposed to be better for electric, time will tell if thats right

Bit of research before you pull the trigger might pay dividends Peter. Not my specialist subject, but I've spent quite a lot of time at sea with both electric propulsion and variable pitch propellers, separately that is, not together. As I understand it, the advantage brought by variable pitch is that of controllability at the expense of some efficiency. Electric propulsion already brings controllability and I'd have thought propeller efficiency is key in your situation. 

[peterboat]

12 minutes ago, Sea Dog said:

Bit of research before you pull the trigger might pay dividends Peter. Not my specialist subject, but I've spent quite a lot of time at sea with both electric propulsion and variable pitch propellers, separately that is, not together. As I understand it, the advantage brought by variable pitch is that of controllability at the expense of some efficiency. Electric propulsion already brings controllability and I'd have thought propeller efficiency is key in your situation. 

Thats why I have posed on here I knew someone would have experience of them, these are auto variable pitch by Brunton they maximise torque which is good for me, however I am all ears if somebody like yourself has used them ta very muchly

[Alan de Enfield]

Just now, peterboat said:

Thats why I have posed on here

 

EV Poser !!!

[IanD]

1 hour ago, peterboat said:

Thats why I have posed on here I knew someone would have experience of them, these are auto variable pitch by Brunton they maximise torque which is good for me, however I am all ears if somebody like yourself has used them ta very muchly

Variable pitch props are used with diesel engines mainly for manoeuvrability or to allow the engine to run in a more efficient torque/power/rpm region over a wide range of speeds. Since electric motors are highly efficient over a wide range of conditions it doesn't seem that a variable pitch prop will help much -- and also they tend to be less efficient than fixed-pitch props where the blade pitch/profile can be optimised for a fixed angle. Very few ships use them which must say something, except ones like short-haul ferries where better manoeuvrability is a big plus.

[Graham Davis]

3 hours ago, ditchcrawler said:

Well they have made a start on the Broads https://www.broads-authority.gov.uk/boating/facilities/electric-boat-charging-points

There are also charging points on the Brecon & Mon, but not sure if they are just for the hire boats.