Smoke on The water

[mrsmelly]

5 minutes ago, Detling said:

Yep but it wont fit a Honda or a Nissan car just my point, no one is going to run a swap service point with 3000 different batteries one for each car/manufacturer.

 

Also helping the grid out may sound good but once my car is charged no one is going to get that power just in case I can't get to work etc.

Precisely. As to cost when do the panel think people who motor on a budget with that being very limited and its millions not thousands that fall in to that category be able to buy the new world electric cars? For instance if I wake up a tree hugger tomorrow how much can I buy a proper electric car for second hand that will get me to cornwall and back in less than a week. Or even a local journey of say only 100 miles and back?

[nb Innisfree]

3 minutes ago, Detling said:

Yep but it wont fit a Honda or a Nissan car just my point, no one is going to run a swap service point with 3000 different batteries one for each car/manufacturer.

 

Also helping the grid out may sound good but once my car is charged no one is going to get that power just in case I can't get to work etc.

Those Hondas and Nissans are already old school, many new designs are in the offing, standardisation is inevitable. Tesla has thrown down the challenge. 

Computers will see to it that cars will have enough power for day to day use. 

The next 10 to 20 years will see a massive change. 

[Chewbacka]

17 minutes ago, Detling said:

So 8kwh for house +  (2 x 13) kwh for two cars = 34kwh per day so over 4 times what the wiring from the grid to the housing area is designed to carry......................................

But your calculation assumes that we use electricity uniformly over the day which we don't.  One of the 'benefits' of smart meters and technically possible smart appliances is you can change the cost of electricity during the day based on the demand and have appliances suspending operation when the price is high.  So if you want to charge your car when everybody is cooking their evening meal it's going to be very expensive.  If the load is all balanced out across the 24 hour day, the additional capacity will be a lot less than your estimation.

[nb Innisfree]

3 minutes ago, mrsmelly said:

Precisely. As to cost when do the panel think people who motor on a budget with that being very limited and its millions not thousands that fall in to that category be able to buy the new world electric cars? For instance if I wake up a tree hugger tomorrow how much can I buy a proper electric car for second hand that will get me to cornwall and back in less than a week. Or even a local journey of say only 100 miles and back?

Well a 6 or 7 year old Nissan Leaf can be had for circa £5k with about 80 - 100 mile range, for local journeys it's a tenth of the cost of an IC car to run. OK they are still a bit pricey but a few years down the line it will be a different story. 

It's coming and you will be forced to accept it. 

1 minute ago, Chewbacka said:

But your calculation assumes that we use electricity uniformly over the day which we don't.  One of the 'benefits' of smart meters and technically possible smart appliances is you can change the cost of electricity during the day based on the demand and have appliances suspending operation when the price is high.  So if you want to charge your car when everybody is cooking their evening meal it's going to be very expensive.  If the load is all balanced out across the 24 hour day, the additional capacity will be a lot less than your estimation.

Battery packs in houses will even out the flow. 

[Chewbacka]

14 minutes ago, mrsmelly said:

Precisely. As to cost when do the panel think people who motor on a budget with that being very limited and its millions not thousands that fall in to that category be able to buy the new world electric cars? For instance if I wake up a tree hugger tomorrow how much can I buy a proper electric car for second hand that will get me to cornwall and back in less than a week. Or even a local journey of say only 100 miles and back?

As most people only do short trips most of the time, then one solution is you have a little electric run about and you hire a car with a bigger battery for those longer trips.  Not very popular, but maybe no choice.  I even see the days of the personal car coming to an end, and for short journeys you use a driverless Uber.  For long journeys you could even swap rental cars during the journey if you don't want to wait a couple of hours for a recharge.

Edited January 4, 2018 by Chewbacka

[MtB]

49 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

Indeed. 

I use about a 25kg bag of coal every three days and two litres of diesel a day.

Was wondering if someone would look up the energy this represents as I'm to lazy to do it myself

 

Ok so I've done it myself

1 litre of diesel contains approx 11kWhrs
1kG smokeless fuel contains approx 9kWhrs

So in a single day when I burn 8kg of coal and two lites of diesel, I am consuming a staggering 40 kWhrs of energy. So much for boating being 'low impact'!

I knew it wasn't really but there are some figures to prove it.  

[nb Innisfree]

I keep hearing that there is no infrastructure but when IC cars were introduced there was no infrastructure to support them then but it soon materialised. 

 

[Jess--]

3 minutes ago, nb Innisfree said:

Well a 6 or 7 year old Nissan Leaf can be had for circa £5k with about 80 - 100 mile range, for local journeys it's a tenth of the cost of an IC car to run. OK they are still a bit pricey but a few years down the line it will be a different story. 

It's coming and you will be forced to accept it. 

Battery packs in houses will even out the flow. 

battery packs in houses will just compound the supply problems

if we say that the batteries & charger systems are 90% efficient (in that if we put 10kwh of mains into a charger we will get 9kwh out of the batteries later on)

putting 10kwh into the batteries on the house gives us 9kwh usable from there, if we then charge a car from the house batteries we end up with 8.1 kwh making it as far as the car batteries having lost 1.9 kwh in charging & battery inefficiencies.

if you add in the option of the house or car batteries feeding power back into the grid and then recharging again (possibly multiple times) you can quite quickly reach the point where you are losing more power to charging losses than you are ever actually using

 

[nb Innisfree]

10 minutes ago, Chewbacka said:

As most people only do short trips most of the time, then one solution is you have a little electric run about and you hire a car with a bigger battery for those longer trips.  Not very popular, but maybe no choice.  I even see the days of the personal car coming to an end, and for short journeys you use a driverless Uber.  For long journeys you could even swap rental cars during the journey if you don't want to wait a couple of hours for a recharge.

Agreed but in fact cars can now be fully recharged in 30 mins. 

[nb Innisfree]

2 minutes ago, Jess-- said:

battery packs in houses will just compound the supply problems

if we say that the batteries & charger systems are 90% efficient (in that if we put 10kwh of mains into a charger we will get 9kwh out of the batteries later on)

putting 10kwh into the batteries on the house gives us 9kwh usable from there, if we then charge a car from the house batteries we end up with 8.1 kwh making it as far as the car batteries having lost 1.9 kwh in charging & battery inefficiencies.

if you add in the option of the house or car batteries feeding power back into the grid and then recharging again (possibly multiple times) you can quite quickly reach the point where you are losing more power to charging losses than you are ever actually using

 

It's not about efficient storage, it's about evening out the demand just as the present grid relies on inefficient diesel generators to do that. 

[mrsmelly]

22 minutes ago, Chewbacka said:

As most people only do short trips most of the time, then one solution is you have a little electric run about and you hire a car with a bigger battery for those longer trips.  Not very popular, but maybe no choice.  I even see the days of the personal car coming to an end, and for short journeys you use a driverless Uber.  For long journeys you could even swap rental cars during the journey if you don't want to wait a couple of hours for a recharge.

Hundreds of thousands of people live in very rural areas such as Lincolnshire, Scotland etc etc etc. They at present MUST use a car as most of these places have ZERO public transport. My mothers village in Yorkshire gets One bus A DAY each way, the list is endless. Swopping cars and hiring an extra one on minimum wages? We have a massively long way to go before leccy happens properly.  20 years as from last year............19 to go!!

[MtB]

12 minutes ago, nb Innisfree said:

Agreed but in fact cars can now be fully recharged in 30 mins. 

 

Ok. So to bung in 13kWhrs into a battery in half an hour, the current draw (assuming 100% charging efficiency, which it won't be) will be well over 100 amps at 240V.

So totally impractical to actually happen from a domestic house charging point.  

Edited January 4, 2018 by Mike the Boilerman

[mrsmelly]

5 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

Ok. So to bung in 13kWhrs into a battery in half an hour, the current draw (assuming 100% charging efficiency, which it won't be) will be well over 100 amps. 

So totally impractical to actually happen from a domestic house charging point.  

But Mike its all going to happen nearly overnight!! 19 years and counting!!

[nb Innisfree]

21 minutes ago, mrsmelly said:

Hundreds of thousands of people live in very rural areas such as Lincolnshire, Scotland etc etc etc. They at present MUST use a car as most of these places have ZERO public transport. My mothers village in Yorkshire gets One bus A DAY each way, the list is endless. Swopping cars and hiring an extra one on minimum wages? We have a massively long way to go before leccy happens properly.  20 years as from last year............19 to go!!

How does she refuel her car? Does she have a tanker full delivered into her storage tank or does she go to a filling station? 

[mrsmelly]

7 minutes ago, nb Innisfree said:

How does she refuel her car? Does she have a tanker full delivered into her storage tank or does she go to a filling station? 

Do you actualy believe that hundreds of thousands/millions of people will be able to put 400 miles of electricity into their accumulators in 3 minutes?

[MtB]

1 minute ago, mrsmelly said:

Do you actualy believe that hundreds of thousands/millions of people will be able to put 400 miles of electricity into their accumulators in 3 minutes?

 

Or even 400 miles into their cars at home in 30 mins?! 

Only possible if the laws of physics are suspended. 

[nb Innisfree]

4 minutes ago, mrsmelly said:

Do you actualy believe that hundreds of thousands/millions of people will be able to put 400 miles of electricity into their accumulators in 3 minutes?

Well not presently but maybe 30 mins. 

2 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

Or even 400 miles into their cars at home in 30 mins?! 

Only possible if the laws of physics are suspended. 

Not at home obviously, superchargers deliver up to 120kw @ 400v DC so require a 3 phase supply. Home charging takes hours mainly to address local journeys. 

[MtB]

4 minutes ago, nb Innisfree said:

Not at home obviously

 

Obvious to the technically literate perhaps, but not certainly not obvious to Mr and Mrs Normal.

Or even to the majority of posters on here.

[peterboat]

1 hour ago, mrsmelly said:

Peter old sport whats the point of having an awesome electric motor and having to stop for two hours minimum every 80 miles? I did 400 miles on boxing day and stopped for 3 minutes at a petrol pump. When do you see electric storage getting to that standard? My car cost me £1250 quid 22k miles ago and its still worth £1250 quid who is going to supply all these replacement leccy cars?

How much more than £ 1250 will the Tesla cost me if I nip to the car shop and buy one later today?

Tim I suspect it will, and the 400 miles would be done on one charge and you wont be driving it. Like all things it will take time but things are moving very fast with most of the effort being towards EVs and not diesels or petrols

[mrsmelly]

6 minutes ago, peterboat said:

Tim I suspect it will, and the 400 miles would be done on one charge and you wont be driving it. Like all things it will take time but things are moving very fast with most of the effort being towards EVs and not diesels or petrols

[nb Innisfree]

18 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

Obvious to the technically literate perhaps, but not certainly not obvious to Mr and Mrs Normal.

Or even to the majority of posters on here.

Sorry if I'm abnormal.

Perhaps you will be better leaving it all to the experts and carrying on as normal. 

[Graham Davis]

2 hours ago, Jess-- said:

lamp post charging is a nice idea until you imagine a road with terraced houses, maybe a lamp post every 100 feet with 6 cars trying to charge from each post.

sadly I don't think the infrastructure for electricity supply in the uk will handle the massive increase in demand for power that a rapid change from internal combustion to electric would require

Doesn't even have to be a row of terraces.
Our cul-de-sac of 10 bungalows, none with on-plot garages, has 2 street lights.
4 of the bungalows are not directly on the road.
And most of us have to park at 2 blocks of 4 garages at either end of the cul-de-sac, which the electricity company refuse to supply power to.

[nb Innisfree]

If, as has been suggested, the UK infrstructure won't be able to handle EVs then I guess we will have to produce our own oil and cars to run from it while the rest of the world moves on. 

[Graham Davis]

1 hour ago, Chewbacka said:

As most people only do short trips most of the time, then one solution is you have a little electric run about and you hire a car with a bigger battery for those longer trips.  Not very popular, but maybe no choice.  I even see the days of the personal car coming to an end, and for short journeys you use a driverless Uber.  For long journeys you could even swap rental cars during the journey if you don't want to wait a couple of hours for a recharge.

Great if you live in an urban area, but as usual people seem to forget that a lot of people still live outside those urban areas.
A 50 mile round trip to a supermarket or to the nearest railway station isn't unusual around here, and you can forget any other public transport.

[nb Innisfree]

12 minutes ago, Graham Davis said:

Great if you live in an urban area, but as usual people seem to forget that a lot of people still live outside those urban areas.
A 50 mile round trip to a supermarket or to the nearest railway station isn't unusual around here, and you can forget any other public transport.

A Nissan Leaf could manage those trips and recharge from a 13amp house socket - about 10 miles per hour charging, so around 5hrs.