OT: How the electric car revolution could backfire

And funnily enough, a key point I made in my OND project on EV's some

If charging stations could hold a range of standardised batteries (s/m/l etc [1]) (and they could, underground and the batteries issued on a lift, like an aircraft carrier) then these ('charged awaiting use') batteries could be also used to help flatten energy demand peaks (even locally) as the infrastructure would already be there.

It could easily happen (and may already being used on some vehicles), whether it will of course ...

Cheers, T i m

until you add in the inconvenience costs of a broken starter motor in the middle of the main street

tim

Spot on.

That's the problem here

The statistics of use are skewed because only the former demographic currently buy an electric car

The 40% of people who live in a house/flat with nowhere to charge one, if they consider buying an electric car at all, will look at the impracticality of charging it and walk away.

That isn't going to change in 2040.

tim

It isn't just older estates

it is normal for new housing estates not to have individual allocated spaces

tim

on 27/07/2017, Max Demian supposed :

I'm not convinced. The engine stops as soon as the bus stops (always), then restarts instantly when they pull away. Some stops are only for 15 seconds, so a lot of wear and nothing saved at all. If the stop is longer, sometimes the engine restarts anyway - I assume to keep the secondary battery topped up, as did the hybrid bus too.

The route has (guess) 50 stops along its way and the bus maybe runs the route six times per day. So potentially 300 stop starts per day.

Slow steady upfgarde. 24% isnt muvch.

MNow go back and put in all the uses to which caol and natural gas are put that you havent covered already.

Thats a 3:1 grid increase I reckon.

I came up with 300GW needed to run the country with all electric.

at a given point that is self defeating. You are using more energy to carry the battery weight than you have added to the cars total.

yes. A typical 'filling ststaion' would need a substation of Railtrack sort of size. A few tens of megewatts.

At 10 times the cost of pylon-run cabling.

Don't they even have driveways?

I suspect rather than backfire it will short circuit.

many do not.

Often there is car access to e.g. a pooled car parking area, with mandatory disoability s*it and then into the house via a back gate or side gate.

That is because those people who can't do that won't buy them.

All that is needed is a range approximately as far as most would drive in one go. Say 250 miles. And the ability to re-charge while you have a break

- say lunch. Both of which should be possible in a few years - judging by progress so far.

What is far more of a problem is upgrading the infrastructure and generating capacity to cope with every vehicle being electric.

Didnlt think electric cars could backfire, thought that was a thing only combustion engines could do ;-)

snipped-for-privacy@gowanhill.com formulated the question :

Have you any idea how much 300Kv armoured cable of that current capacity might cost per yard? Do you know why they run them on pylons at the moment.

I have considered an electric car but only on the basis that all our local charging points are free to use (paid for by council), and that would overcome the inconvenience of walking to get the car occasionally.

Fortunately some places here still have bare overhead electricity distribution so a ladder and croc clips might come in handy. In other places the 1930s distribution has been replaced by concentric overhead cable.

Owain

This is practical today, for example see: