I don't think the timing issue is much of an issue, it doesn't need all cars to charge as soon as they get home - even your mobile phone determines when it's best to charge, based on your routine - mine knows I wake up at 8am and so it holds off on topping the charge until 7:30 to maintain the battery life.

The same smart charging capabilities are already in cars with the rollout of smarter capabilities into the grid, we can do the same on a local or national scale - we're not constrained by the old/dumb tech anymore!

If your house knows you'll be wanting hot water for your shower at 6am, but the sun won't be up until 8am and you won't leave the house until 11am, then it can use your EV battery to heat your water then make use of the free electric from 8am to have the car ready for you at 11 - this is all possible and extremely efficient

I agree there's efficiency losses in converting from AC to DC, but feeding AC back into the grid has been happening for years, anyone using solar panels will tell you this, they feed AC back into the grid when they're generating more than they're using, then take it back when they need it. The "feed in tariff" determines how much you get paid for that electricity.

To be honest, it's more efficient to feed power from a DC solar panel into an electric car than it is to convert to AC and feed into the grid, so that's another win for EV's...

This is all very new tech and developing quickly, but it looks very promising!

The one thing about EV's that gets me is what happens when you are heading 100 miles home at night in winter and you get stuck in a traffic jam. Lights going, heating going etc. how much battery life will you have?
Also it's OK now with a few tens of thousand electric car but what will happen when we have hundreds of thousands of them? We will need an awful lot of motorway charging points and will the national grid be able to cope?
Ivan 2013 Vogue SE SDV8
2013 Freelander 2 SD4 HSE Luxury

18 coal power stations have closed since the peak power demand of 2002, 4 remain and all Coal power stations are set to all be closed by 2025,

Between 2003 and 2015 eleven nuclear sites were shut down... 7 left which provides 19% of base load

Gas has seen a big decline with a reduction from 127 TWh to 100 TWh this year

capacity has been added and made up with mainly wind and then solar projects which now make up about 40% of capacity.

The EV revolution alone is set to increase demand on power generation by between 10 and 25% depending on what you read.

See the problem here? Base load reductions over the last 20 years have been massive and renewable energy is now heading for over 50% of capacity in the the next 10 years.... get a week or two of no wind and grey days and the Uk will brown out at best or vast areas will black out altogether... your EV batteries will be flat in that time so even if they did add some capacity to the grid it wouldn’t help.

How likely is that... 2016 the UK went 16 days without wind/wind generated... remove 1/2 the capacity of the national grid for more than 2 weeks and you will have massive issues not just with the lack of EV transport... electric trains, tubes, hospitals etc will all have massive problems.

Remember just last year that with only 2 power stations going offline, one gas and one wind farm... this caused chaos as the national grid didn’t have capacity and sent England and Wales into a blackout. This shows how little capacity is really in the network... and the UK government are planning to plug in every car... madness.

Again putting all our eggs in one basket with one fuel type will not end well.

I am for greener initiatives but hydrogen, hybrid and other tech should not be blocked in favor of one fledgling tech. Why not tell manufacturers what the target emissions have to be and by what date... let them work it out.

ur20v wrote:

Lastly your though on using the EV batteries as some sort of Tesla’s battery power station to smooth demand like they have in South Australia and now being built in Germany doesn’t unfortunately work, EV batteries are DC and the chargers convert the AC mains supply into DC to charge, this means back feeding the grid is impossible, also would be illegal... even if technically possible (some sort of inverter) you wouldn’t be allowed to do this it as it would mean the grid could never be shut down in an emergency or for service work.

Exactly when the grid goes down the batteries/solar are disconnected automatically. At the moment EV chargers don’t have an inverter built in to back feed the grid... I would have issue with letting the grid use my EV battery pack due to the limited battery life/cycle numbers and cost of replacement.

I agree that grid tie of solar systems is a good idea.

The possibility of the entire grid going does not bear thinking about.

Virtually everything connected to the grid would have to be isolated, one conventional power station run up and stabilised (with some load on it), another one run up & synchronised with the 1st one, more load added & so on.

Could be a little simpler is we could buy power off the French (don't know if we still do).

None of the sources such as solar/wind that basically generate DC that has to be converted to AC via synchronised inverters could go on line until the grid had stabilised.

At least I will generally have around 500 miles worth of power in my diesel tank if it ever happens.

The last year or so have seen more brownouts & some blackouts in my area with increasing use of my 6kva fossil; fuelled generator.

I'm not against EV's at all - just against 100% adoption of them, for various reasons.

No doubt I will be accused of generating fake news but hey, form your own opinions. 2003 Range Rover Vogue TD6

Last edited by Brian Considine on 18th Nov 2020 5:43pm. Edited 1 time in total

It’s not ‘fake news’ Brian but the truth.

It’s like relying on one fuel source at home, if things go wrong then you are stuffed, having a wood burning stove, gas hob and electric cooker mean there’s always a way to heat and cook food. If you are on electric for everything then there’s a blackout or electrical fault at home you are sunk until a repair is sorted.

Same for transport. A mix is good. Just make the emissions and green credential targets as struck as the government needs then let the manufacturers work it out.

Electricity isn’t all green by any means and doesn’t suit all transport needs.

Given that I haven't had a new car for years (since my last company car) then this won't be a problem for me so what will be will be. I keep trying to tell the wife that she should have an electric car but she's dead against (although I suspect I will be the one that does the plugging in). I read without any understanding the techno babble around electricity generation and distribution but if on January 2030 I find myself in a showroom looking for a car for the wife and its got to be electric - so be it - not much point in worrying about it now. Geoff

The big elephant in the room in this debate is the carbon footprint of all the extra rare earth minerals which will be needed to manufacture the batteries plus all the component manufacture of the wind/solar equipment needed to create the leccy to charge said batteries.

As for greening up the housing stock, the cost of doing that properly is stratospheric. Anyone with a house built pre 1919 will be in for a ‘surprise’. You’ll need to wrap your nice brick house in some form of polymer based foam, which will alter its appearance. That’s before you’ve worked out how to get a ground source heat pump to heat as efficiently and effectively as a modern gas boiler and dealt with the condensation issues created by the insulation. This has the potential to be a cowboys charter if the Govt is not careful.

So after today’s news what do we reckon will happen to the values of our fossil fuelled FF’s?

A. Fall off a cliff because nobody will touch them with a barge pole.

B. Double in value, because demand will outstrip supply as everyone tries to get a last piece of V8 action.

Assuming the Government stick to their 10 year plan, it will be interesting to see how it pans out.

A combination of A and B. Just like a lot of people jumped on the diesel bandwagon when it made no sense did their journeys there will be those who will switch when there is no need to. And also there will be those who love to keep that petrol power especially when you can’t buy them new anymore.

Diesel has had it though, well and truly. It’s already being priced out to go into major cities. And it will become less and less attractive. I think those values will continue to plummet.

My search for a 5.0 SC just stepped up a notch! I’ve been watching prices most of the year and even before this the price of a 3 y/o sc was holding up at around £60-65k at MDs. The problem I have is the current car is likely to be worth less than the finance outstanding, so price to trade is higher than ideal. I could hang on to the current car for another 2 years and just hand back to LRFS, the risk being a 3yo sc will be even more expensive by then!

Even is we could solve the logistical problems associated with having to charge millions of EV's, 10 years isn't enough time to build the 20 or so new nuclear power stations required to deliver all the extra demand  2007 Zermatt Silver TDV8 Vogue SE - now sold but was a great car!

we need to get over this virus before we think about something 10 years in the future.. ... - .- -.




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I think sales will be a mixed bag.

The rich with offstreet parking will go electric at a blink but keep their exotics.

The poor and those with no off street parking will keep away from electric and buy used small petrol cars... can’t see FF’s of any discription or similar cars being wanted by theses buyers due to size/parking and road tax etc

...so used newish small petrol cars will hold their values well in ten years, the rest will devalue quicker over the next 15 yrs than they would have if this policy wasn’t in place.