phasing out of fossil fuels - programme

[1st ade]

1 minute ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

Sadly each house has 4 cars ...

That's a different (although equally valid) point

[David Mack]

1 hour ago, doratheexplorer said:

My understanding is that most local authorities have a policy on this anyway and, if they're not included on the plans, a planning condition will be added to ensure the electric charging points are installed prior to occupation.  Certainly, that's my experience.

 

1 hour ago, Mike Todd said:

Not our experience and it is very recent (current)

I only look at local planning applications occasionally, but I have certainly seen conditions added that EV charge points must be included. Not sure if its universal yet though.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, David Mack said:

And how many people in your area have garages, but still park their car(s) in the driveway or on the road because the garage is used for storage/workshop/gym/converted to extra living room etc.?

Our house was built in 1994 and has an integral garage.

 

We can just about get our car into it, just. Unfortunately if you want to then actually get out of the car you can't. The doors just won't open sufficiently. So you either have to climb out through the sunroof (Which our current car doesn't have) or resign yourself to living/sleeping/eating in it till it was time to go out again.

 

Luckily they built the whole estate with double width drives and double width dropped kerbs which was a godesnd when we we were working and had two cars.

 

Our garage is used for storage/freezer/bikes etc etc.

 

It will no doubt count within any sort of official stats. but effectively it's useless as it's originally intended purpose.

[IanD]

1 hour ago, David Mack said:

 

I only look at local planning applications occasionally, but I have certainly seen conditions added that EV charge points must be included. Not sure if its universal yet though.

Still doesn't solve the far bigger charging problem of existing housing with no off-street parking though, which affects far more people, about 8M houses (a third of 24M housing stock) compared to 170k new builds last year.

 

This is what councils and the government really need to address to help "BEV losers", and it's being largely ignored (like many other things for existing houses) as they talk up their wonderful green policies for new houses -- probably because it's a lot more expensive and difficult to solve, but that's no excuse really...

Edited December 30, 2020 by IanD

[ditchcrawler]

IMO all new houses should have solar on the roof and charging points, also the best insulation available, it would cost a very small fraction of the house cost and would  be saved in a very short time, but builders wont take it on unless they have to. I bought a bungalow about 6 years ago and it has three pronged low energy lamps in the bedrooms, what was that likely to save.

[Mad Harold]

1 hour ago, The Happy Nomad said:

Our house was built in 1994 and has an integral garage.

 

We can just about get our car into it, just. Unfortunately if you want to then actually get out of the car you can't. The doors just won't open sufficiently. So you either have to climb out through the sunroof (Which our current car doesn't have) or resign yourself to living/sleeping/eating in it till it was time to go out again.

 

Luckily they built the whole estate with double width drives and double width dropped kerbs which was a godesnd when we we were working and had two cars.

 

Our garage is used for storage/freezer/bikes etc etc.

 

It will no doubt count within any sort of official stats. but effectively it's useless as it's originally intended purpose.

My garage is similar.

But it is too useful a storage space just to put a car in.

[IanD]

11 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

IMO all new houses should have solar on the roof and charging points, also the best insulation available, it would cost a very small fraction of the house cost and would  be saved in a very short time, but builders wont take it on unless they have to. I bought a bungalow about 6 years ago and it has three pronged low energy lamps in the bedrooms, what was that likely to save.

You're right that builders won't spend extra money unless they have to, but this can happen two ways -- the first is government regulation which many companies and people resist for various reasons, the second is buyer's opinions which are partly driven by public information.

 

If many buyers decide that they won't consider a new house unless it has solar/charging/insulation -- which after all will save them a lot of money -- you can bet that builders would decide to fit these pretty damn quickly, because otherwise people will buy a house that *does* have them.

 

In other words the first builders to make the brave decision to do this could suddenly find they can sell more houses and probably at a small price premium, which would at least cover their additional costs. It should be good business, but it needs buyer education...

Edited December 30, 2020 by IanD

[ditchcrawler]

1 minute ago, IanD said:

 .

 

If many buyers decide that they won't consider a new house unless it has solar/charging/insulation -- which after all will save them a lot of money -- you can bet that builders would decide to fit these pretty damn quickly, because otherwise people will buy a house that *does* have them.

That is OK if the choice is there, when have you seen a new housing estate offering this?  Nowhere!  You can't go down the road and buy one with it and they know that.

[IanD]

Just now, ditchcrawler said:

That is OK if the choice is there, when have you seen a new housing estate offering this?  Nowhere!  You can't go down the road and buy one with it and they know that.

As I said, it needs buyers to push for this and builders willing to install it in the hope that it'll help them sell more houses. Just because it isn't there yet doesn't mean that will always be the case -- even three years ago there were very few electric cars sold, now they're more than doubling every year. Change can happen quickly when there's enough incentive and some commercial pressure...

[Mike Todd]

2 hours ago, IanD said:

The charger problem is relatively easy to solve for new-build houses even without legislation, because people will soon have it on their ""essential features" list. But as everyone knows the number of these being built is tiny, only about 1% of the housing stock is replaced each year.

 

So by far the biggest problem is charging for the one-third of existing dwellings without off-street parking, and in many cases this has to be solved by local councils because it means installing infrastructure which only they can do.

 

In turn this needs financing, which means from central government since cash-strapped councils certainly can't afford it or have even more crucial things to spend their budget on. 

 

And this shows a blind spot in policy; the government is rightly taking measures (like taxation) to encourage people to switch to BEVs, but they're falling down on the job of putting charging infrastructure in place to support them -- more specifically providing money for this.

 

The usual Tory approach of hoping that "the markets" will make it will happen won't work, the private sector will simply cherry-pick lucrative areas for installation and ignore poor ones, just like happens with buses. This needs proper thought-through investment from the government to develop what is an essential national infrastructure.

Is it replaced or extended?

 

As far as I can see the total number of homes is 25 million and annual rate of increase in the housing stock is around 200,000 ie just under 1%. The number demolished is not so easy to find and the highest estimate seems to be around 10,000 per annum, not significant in the context of your argument. Hence, whilst the number of newly built houses is around 1% (not all of which will have charging points provided) the number that have already been built and likely not to have them remains pretty much the same. (Glass half full and glass half empty are not always the same!)

[doratheexplorer]

26 minutes ago, IanD said:

Still doesn't solve the far bigger charging problem of existing housing with no off-street parking though, which affects far more people, about 8M houses (a third of 24M housing stock) compared to 170k new builds last year.

 

This is what councils and the government really need to address to help "BEV losers", and it's being largely ignored (like many other things for existing houses) as they talk up their wonderful green policies for new houses -- probably because it's a lot more expensive and difficult to solve, but that's no excuse really...

Very true.  AFAIK the Council's round here don't even provide EV changing in their own car parks (including staff car parks), yet they're happy to insist that developers put them in.  Just as a start, there should be EV charging available in all paid car park which have electric lighting.  Then we can move on to a roll out of kerbside charging.  Until that happens, or significant advances are made in charging speed and range, I can't really consider BEV.  If I had a house with a driveway, I would probably already have one by now.

[Guest]

32 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

That is OK if the choice is there, when have you seen a new housing estate offering this?  Nowhere!  You can't go down the road and buy one with it and they know that.

There was a housing estate built some years ago in a market town near us that had solar fitted from new. Though lots have been built in the same town and neighboring towns that don't have it.

 

 

[ditchcrawler]

9 minutes ago, The Happy Nomad said:

There was a housing estate built some years ago in a market town near us that had solar fitted from new. Though lots have been built in the same town and neighboring towns that don't have it.

 

 

But even that is a small area so as to get the feed in tariff without metering, each of those houses could have carried twice that amount. However I agree it is a step in the right direction.

[peterboat]

1 minute ago, ditchcrawler said:

But even that is a small area so as to get the feed in tariff without metering, each of those houses could have carried twice that amount. However I agree it is a step in the right direction.

I have way more on my boat

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

But even that is a small area so as to get the feed in tariff without metering, each of those houses could have carried twice that amount. However I agree it is a step in the right direction.

I think it was a marketing ploy more than anything else.

[IanD]

The really annoying thing is that none of this is rocket science (yes I know, it's the engineering that's difficult), there are no real technical or business obstacles to making it all happen.

 

What *is* lacking is forward planning and focus from the UK government.

 

If I point out that some other governments in the EU seem to be doing a much better job of this, will I get shouted down? ?

[doratheexplorer]

29 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

IMO all new houses should have solar on the roof and charging points, also the best insulation available, it would cost a very small fraction of the house cost and would  be saved in a very short time, but builders wont take it on unless they have to. I bought a bungalow about 6 years ago and it has three pronged low energy lamps in the bedrooms, what was that likely to save.

You'd be amazed at how hard LA planners have to fight to get anything out of developers in this area though.  Even where the LA has standards for minimum renewable energy (10% of total in a housing development for example), many developers will still find way of wriggling out of it.  One such method is known as the 'fabric first approach'.  This basically means that the developer says that the materials they are using have good insulating properties which will save that 10% anyway, so they don't have to bother with solar panels.  There is case law which backs up this approach.  To my mind, using the most insulating materials on a new build should be a given anyway, and should be required in building regs.

9 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

But even that is a small area so as to get the feed in tariff without metering, each of those houses could have carried twice that amount. However I agree it is a step in the right direction.

Far more than twice.  Those panels look like less than a third of the roof area.

[IanD]

8 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

You'd be amazed at how hard LA planners have to fight to get anything out of developers in this area though.  Even where the LA has standards for minimum renewable energy (10% of total in a housing development for example), many developers will still find way of wriggling out of it.  One such method is known as the 'fabric first approach'.  This basically means that the developer says that the materials they are using have good insulating properties which will save that 10% anyway, so they don't have to bother with solar panels.  There is case law which backs up this approach.  To my mind, using the most insulating materials on a new build should be a given anyway, and should be required in building regs.

That's because the business of developers is to maximise their profits, just like any other business, it's not to altruistically supply eco-friendly houses built to high standards of energy efficiency just because that makes environmental sense or it's what the LA would like to happen.

 

The only ways to get them to do this are regulation or customer demand, and at the moment neither is doing a good job of it ?

 

(or have high-quality "eco-council-houses" financed and built by the government, but this is ideologically unacceptable to those in power today)

Edited December 30, 2020 by IanD

[doratheexplorer]

3 minutes ago, IanD said:

That's because the business of developers is to maximise their profits, just like any other business, it's not to altruistically supply eco-friendly houses built to high standards of energy efficiency just because that makes environmental sense or it's what the LA would like to happen.

 

The only ways to get them to do this are regulation or customer demand, and at the moment neither is doing a good job of it ?

 

(or have high-quality "eco-council-houses" financed and built by the government, but this is ideologically unacceptable to those in power today)

The regulations in this area are woefully inadequate.  Our government would say that a light touch is needed or economic growth will be slowed.  I would say that their entire economic model is flawed and is gradually bringing our species to catastrophe.  This country consistently elects governments with an extraordinarily narrow field of view.  Maybe that's because the population mostly does too.  After all, appraising yourself of the bigger picture leads down a pretty frightening path.  Who would want to do that?

[IanD]

10 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

The regulations in this area are woefully inadequate.  Our government would say that a light touch is needed or economic growth will be slowed.  I would say that their entire economic model is flawed and is gradually bringing our species to catastrophe.  This country consistently elects governments with an extraordinarily narrow field of view.  Maybe that's because the population mostly does too.  After all, appraising yourself of the bigger picture leads down a pretty frightening path.  Who would want to do that?

People don't like being told they have to make changes in their comfortable lifestyles for a benefit many years in the future. Governments don't want to tell people the bad news -- even if they know it's true -- because it loses them votes.

 

Whose fault is it really?

[doratheexplorer]

17 minutes ago, IanD said:

People don't like being told they have to make changes in their comfortable lifestyles for a benefit many years in the future. Governments don't want to tell people the bad news -- even if they know it's true -- because it loses them votes.

 

Whose fault is it really?

It's everyone's fault.  Although, I'm more inclined to hold those who seek power to account for it. 

[IanD]

1 hour ago, doratheexplorer said:

It's everyone's fault.  Although, I'm more inclined to hold those who seek power to account for it. 

I'm inclined to agree -- but on the principle that to accomplish anything you need to be in power, telling people something they don't want to hear which might get you removed from power -- especially with the baying of the tabloid hounds -- is never going to be an attractive option...

[Ronaldo47]

9 hours ago, ditchcrawler said:

 I bought a bungalow about 6 years ago and it has three pronged low energy lamps in the bedrooms, what was that likely to save.

The building regs did get amended to make it compulsory for a proportion of the lampholders in new builds and extensions to be only capable of accepting low energy bulbs, but some builders, including those building social housing for housing assciations, fitted them throughout. Hence the use of the three pin bayonet and its expensive, difficult to buy,  CFL bulbs that were notorious for their short lives. Fortunately that requirement has now been revoked and you are free to replace your 3-pin lampholders with standard BC ( or ES or whatever ) types. I did see an internet hint that an ordinary BC bulb would fit if you carefully cut off one of its pins.

Edited December 30, 2020 by Ronaldo47
Typos

[cuthound]

On 29/12/2020 at 18:59, ditchcrawler said:

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/tesla-semi-electric-lorry-launch-pushed-back-2020

 

Mr Musk is leaving it a bit late to launch his electric truck in 2020. He only has a few hours left!

[peterboat]

1 minute ago, cuthound said:

 

Mr Musk is leaving it a bit late to launch his electric truck in 2020. He only has a few hours left!

I thought it was put back to 2021 way earlier this year? Before battery day in fact. 

I was reading yesterday that the CEO of VW has now got the backing to go all out for EVs he has looked at Tesla on his doorstep and jumped on the bandwagon, don't blame him BMW and Mercedes could be goners