Peter Sarf
Established Member
Yes but - in a long hard winter how much chance is there that your EV won't be ready for a long journey ?.
Also this charging and discharging will be eating into the batteries life ?.
-
Our new ticketing site is now live! Using either this or the original site (both powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!
UK switching to electric vehicles discussion
- Thread starter MattA7
- Start date
Also this charging and discharging will be eating into the batteries life ?.
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R
RailUK Forums
I realise we're all at different places in our knowledge around BEVs, but these theories have been debunked multiple times by National Grid themselves (and the reports have been referenced in this thread.)
Again, discussed at length previously, but a) it's optional and b) you can set the parameters within the car ("I need 80% by 7am" and the system sorts it out for you.)
My point was that the EV chargers are fewer and the usage time per car higher, so there is more likely to be a queue for them, and the queue would take longer to ease. When refuelling at a pump, you don't leave the car for 30 minutes while you get a bite to eat etc - you park in the car park.
The solution is more chargers, shorter charge times (either by faster speeding rates or time limits to recharge) or a mixture. But if it is time restricted, so you never get a full charge, you will end up stopping at more service areas along your route than you would otherwise need to, each with a time penalty.
In 30 years of driving, I've had two "drop everything and go" journeys over 100 miles, where I wouldn't have wanted to wait to charge a car. Normally, I know that I'm going for a long drive early enough, so I could make sure that my car was fully charged.
Charge/discharge cycles will have a cost, so I would want to sell electricity back to the grid at a price to cover that.
A few months ago, you mentioned that your budget for a car was £2000-£4000. I don't think V2G cars are going to be in that price range for a while!
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
The stress test for the charging network will probably be a football match where lots of people have travelled a long distance*. You might not want to queue for a charger before the match to be sure to get there. Then it finishes and several thousand cars set off at the same time. Small queues for chargers are a hassle. Long queues could block up the service stations. If this prompts people to try to make it to a further charger and they run out of power, it could overwhelm the breakdown services.
* insert Manchester United joke here
Last edited:
A colleague lives 1/2 mile from a football ground and has a carpark space & charger, but no car, so rents out the space. Has a few visiting fans rent the space for the afternoon. Not a quick charger but every little helps.
I doubt that there will be many who drive EV,s that haven't learnt their vehicles' limits and adjusted their old (ICV) habits to avoid such a problem. Apart from the effects of severe weather and very bad collisions, occurrences of mass stupidity are pretty rare, and the existing roads provide enough lessons of how to manage resulting congestion.
I'm the other way round. I only half fill the tank and then put more in when it gets low or fill up when I have a long journey planned No point lugging a full tank of fuel around fir local journeys. With an electric I will most likely keep ut fully charged.
We have other means of generating energy in times of high demand, from using more gas to importing more. This is about reducing the need to use dirtier fuels, which given one day there will be many millions of cars on driveways with enough power to run an average home for two days or more, is surely ideal for balancing the load.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
Given the number of charge cycles a battery can handle, I doubt many people are going to worry too much - especially if a lot of people still only keep a car for 3-5 years. A charge cycle is from 0-100-0% and I doubt any one car will be asked to supply all of its power (if it even could, assuming a car could supply power back at 3 or 4kWh - maybe 7?).
And while I am sure there are some people who need to have a car prepped and ready for a 800 mile trip to help a sick grand parent, but most won't, and most certainly won't forever. If you did know a family member (or friend) was very ill and you were the only person who could help, you might prepare your car different (by keeping it fully charged) or maybe even stay closer to that person, or even with them, until they were better.
Last edited:
HSTEd
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 14 Jul 2011
- Messages
- 20,368
As a decarbonisation researcher, I must admit to being extremely skeptical that 'Vehicle to Grid' will ever be much more than a party trick.
The benefits of car charging under grid control are already so enormous (up to 90-210GW demand.... On demand) that the troubles the extra step produce don't seem worth it.
(30 million cars and between 3kW and 7kW charging per car)
The benefits of car charging under grid control are already so enormous (up to 90-210GW demand.... On demand) that the troubles the extra step produce don't seem worth it.
(30 million cars and between 3kW and 7kW charging per car)
As a researcher, what is your opinion for Industrial Ioniser / Fuel cell technology as a means of a electrical demand balancing or smoothing?
During low demand , surplus generated electricity converts water to hydrogen gas, during high demand, the hydrogen is converted to electricity fed into the National grid? a technology which is feasible or just a pipe dream?
At the same range as new? Full EV will only become realistic for me when range is (and remains) comparable with ICE (even after 10 years) and “refuelling” can be done in a comparable time. (Or the facilities to do so while parked are available so widely that you are guaranteed to find one wherever you park)
Horrifically inefficient. It's better to just use batteries, or for longer duration storage pumped hydro, liquid air or basically anything other than hydrogen which has a round trip efficiency of around 20%
I suggest you take an extended test drive of an EV and you'll see just how practical they are.
HSTEd
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 14 Jul 2011
- Messages
- 20,368
Electricity to Hydrogen to Electricity has a pretty awful round-trip efficiency.
It's going to produce rather expensive electricity.
It can be done technically, but it's like generating power by burning banknotes.
Hydrogen will probably be in demand for aviation fuel and chemical synthesis, but I can't see it being attractive for bulk power generation (beyond emergency reserves that go years without being used).
Jim Bamford thinks it's the way to go for JCBs, tractors and heavy plant. Harry Metcalf has recently interviewed him.
An extra 20kG of fuel in a car weighing over 1000kG is hardly significant. And I was always taught, probably incorrectly but it sticks, that letting the tank get nearly empty was a bad thing because it stirred up sediment.
I think that its a bit too complicated for most. I know a few who are on Intelligent Octopus Go and seem to handle it ok with some quirks as the VW app notifies every time it stops charging. I think that’s the limit for most people.
The charger required is also expensive, Octopus say about £6000. They give you free charging but at 18mi per day*, 4mi/kWh and 6.7p/kWh**, this would take 54 years to pay off. Those who drive more will pay it off quicker but will have less of their battery available to the grid.
*UK Average - Source
**E.ON next drive tariff, this is a fixed time overnight so you can use any charger.
I haven’t watched that specific interview but JCBs argument is that battery makes sense for small machines used in built up areas but will struggle to charge where infrastructure hasn’t been built and where machines work 18 hours per day. Hydrogen fuel cells don’t like dust so they are choosing hydrogen combustion engines.
I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable but green hydrogen isn’t cheap…
HSTEd
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 14 Jul 2011
- Messages
- 20,368
Well, I guess the market will decide.
But hydrogen combustion engines have major downsides in terms of torque etc.
I wonder how it will do against things like synthetic fuel oil.
On the other hand, how big is the UK market for construction vehicles in areas where no on site power supply is available?
But it is also the time taken to recharge EV construction vehicles. The vehicles run 8 - 10 hours per day, probably more than an EV charge. Hydrogen fuels quickly. Farms are another application - combine harvesters run for 16 hours or so at harvest when time is of the essence. EVs would not be practical.
Snow1964
Established Member
Jim Bamford (grandson of Joseph Cyril Bamford, who founded JCB) has strong motivation to push hydrogen use, as he owns or runs Ryze Power (a hydrogen producer), and rescued Wrightbus (which he also tried to push to hydrogen vehicles until market preferred Battery electric)
Home chargers do not cost £6,000!
I think that price might have come from this Octopus Power Pack scheme, it says:
I can't find a UK vendor for one of those, but this one in France charges €5990
The V2G compatible cars listed on the Octopus site are:
so I think its an out of date page.
https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicle-to-grid-v2g-explained says:
Indeed, the V2G ones are much more complicated so cost a lot more. The Wallbox Quasar is currently not sold in the UK so Octopus Power Pack is only available to existing installations.
A basic EVEC 7kw unit is ~£300-350, it won't work with Intelligent Octopus Go but most cars can do time-of-use tariffs themselves so will be fine for the E.ON Drive tariff I've mentioned previously.
HSTEd
Veteran Member
- Joined
- 14 Jul 2011
- Messages
- 20,368
Hydrogen might notionally fuel quickly but comes with a very unwieldy fuel supply chain. It's very questionable whether it is actually workable in any scale. In the medium term it likely loses to methanol or synthetic fuel oil made using the hydrogen.
There is also a lot of plant equipment that won't move long distances during a shift, which could be run with a cable attached.
Some cars will work with IOG and a dumb charger, or one that doesn't work with IOG.
When we charge our Kia Niro we use the scheduling function in the charger. When we charge the Tesla, IOG controls it via the car.
This was part of a V2G trial some years ago and not what Octopus hopes (pending Government regulator approval) to launch next spring, with cars like the Renault 5 EV.
I am not sure if Octopus will combine a V2G system with a home battery also, so you can still have some power if you drive the car somewhere, but hopefully there will be various options.
If you had your car (with a 40-50kWh battery) and a home battery, maybe 5kWh, then you could do a lot of clever things, allowing Octopus to manage your battery to your parameters (like Intelligent Octopus Go, you might say you need a certain battery level at all times or at a specified time, so use the car as much as you want through the evening but make sure I'm back to 80% by 0600). Likewise, it might opt to charge your car in the middle of the day if it is cheaper energy than late at night, and as long as you always plug in at home then happy days.
In the coming years when people may own more than one EV, there's even more flexibility and I can't really imagine right now all the possibilities - but the fact of the matter is, if there's all this battery storage available all over the UK then it's quite insane not to use it over importing more expensive gas.
The Renault 5 appears to have AC V2G, which should have much more affordable chargers. It could be interesting and work well for some who regularly have their car at home during the day, but I'm struggling to see mass market adoption.
I don't think anyone expects one car to change the world, but it's going to be one of, or the, first cars to offer this - and it hopefully finds itself a market. I think the car itself is going to sell in huge numbers without anyone knowing or caring about V2G, and it may well be a car that people buy as a second car. And eventually people with more than one car will have more than one EV, so I can't see how or why this won't work in the long term.
My bell-weather indicator of EV understanding is my Dad, and I have detected the first thawing in his mind on the subject. Up to now, he has just not had the capability to understand how the EV ecosystem works and therefore, by default, it was rubbish. (One example: “We got all the way from Utrecht to Chester on a tank of diesel, you couldn’t do that in an EV could you” - to which I asked if he had done that without stopping for food, toilet, sleep etc, knowing he had taken 3 days and 2 nights for the trip…)
However yesterday he declared himself impressed about how many new charging places he had seen at motorway services and other places, how there was never a queue for them, and how various models of EV looked very smart. We havent had our usual argument about the subject yet!
However yesterday he declared himself impressed about how many new charging places he had seen at motorway services and other places, how there was never a queue for them, and how various models of EV looked very smart. We havent had our usual argument about the subject yet!
The thing is we live in Britain, not the US, Australia or even continental Europe. Most decent family EVs have a real world range of 250-300 miles, with smaller cars coming in at 150-250 miles.
To put that in context if you are driving in a decent EV family car from London to Glasgow, which is about 400 miles depending on chosen route, assuming you leave at 100% (which is fine as you aren’t going to be doing this journey everyday) you will only need to add another 30-70% during your entire journey. Which is likely to take round 20-30 minutes depending on when you stop. You don’t need a full charge. While you could ‘fully charge’ as you say this would be both slow and unnecessary for the vast majority of use cases in Britain.
johncrossley
Established Member
Of course, it is possible to leave the UK and drive for hundreds of miles on the continent or to Ireland. So potential travel distance is largely irrelevant. What counts is what people actually use their car for.