Anyone interested in what the future might hold might be interested in this development. With a 60 acre solar farm and a 6 megaWatt hour battery they expect to be able to charge a very large number of vehicles renewably and help with grid balancing. Price per kWhr expected to be lower than the competition too (around 25p I believe).
A lot of real estate for 32 cars!
*yawn*
Tim
The 60 acre solar farm is miles away, just off Mersea Island and connects straight to the grid. There is a 5MW grid connection to the charging site. The site is where it is as there is a 400kV switch station just up the road (A120). The canopies are loaded with solar, but that is small beer compared to the power requirement - even with a 6MW backup battery.
What a wonderful picture of a man with his fingers in his ears and his head in the sand you do present.
Reading this, I am reminded I have some roadside land with an unused
415V power supply:-)
The price for the power maybe low... but that's not going to matter when fuel duty is replaced by pay-per-mile duty with time of day premiums added for when you drive in a busy period.
All that missing fuel duty is going to be collected from driving still.
Of course it is. I don?t think anyone has suggested otherwise. I still think that this is a very interesting development that will not only benefit EV owners but also help with grid demand.
Tim
Yes, you?re quite right. This development can only charge 32 cars total and petrol/diesel production uses no real estate. Silly of me not to realise that.
Tim
Will it really make a significant contribution to grid stabilisation? It seems unlikely, bearing in mind that the giant Tesla battery used for that purpose at Hornsdale in Oz is 194MWh at 150MW. At 6MWh, this one is a minnow by comparison. Sounds like sales hype. And how long will that battery supply power during a week of dull winter days, before it starts drawing directly from the grid, along with all the other similar charging stations that will have to be built to fulfil Boris' promises?
OK, I know it's easy to poo-poo these things - it's a start, I suppose, but I still think it's going to be a real problem positioning, constructing and supplying adequate chargers for a national all-electric road-transport fleet.
I've already pointed out that if you want to run the f****ng grid for 5 days using that Aussie battery, you'll need 20,000 of them and it will cost £1,000,000,000,000 to install them. And it'll take Tesla 80 years to make them.
But the throughput is greatly reduced because of the charging times. Maybe 32 charging stations is the equivalent of three petrol pumps?
Bill
And build houses for all the immigrants.
Bill
I don't know where you lernt maffs but 100GW of solar needs 30km^2 of panels - at 1.6m^2 and 200W per panel.
Just think of how many more charging stations they could have put in the same area if they hadn't required cars to parallel park at the stations. It's no different to a motorway service station with additional facilities but with this poor layout they seem to catering for only a few people having electric cars rather than the future proofing they claim where electric is the normal.
What happens in a overcast day in winter when it doesn't get light until
8am and dark again by 4pm (and that's in the south of the UK). Does the 60 acre solar farm produce enough power to supply the grid at times of peak demand, charge the 6MWh battery and charge 72 cars an hour for 12hours per day (18+MWh). Back of envelope says not.The owner of the operation suggests that when his solar panels don't work that the windmills supply the power for car and 6MWh battery charging or the power comes from conventional sources and his solar makes up for that when the sun does shine.
There have been times in the last month when the wind hasn't been blowing.
It's not solving any real problem by balancing out taking power in the winter months from the grid and then replenishing it in the summer months. In 2030/2050 the majority of the cars on the road are electric, and the majority of household heating is electric this is when green solutions such as solar NEED to produce the power during the hours of darkness in the cold months. It's the intermittency of the green solutions put forward today that is part of the problem if coupled with the enforced closure or other forms of energy generation and or the enforcement of electricity (or currently unobtainium) for motoring and domestic heating.
Why didn't the owner of the solar farm install enough battery power to keep his operation going 24/365 from his own solar source as part of the claimed future proofing - he says batteries are cheap?
Yes, this charging station may seem to be green in the summer months at which time may reduce some CO2 generation but it it is not part of an overall "Climate Emergency" solution. It's just a car charging station for electric cars, a few shops and a car showroom and not part of a green revolution solution.
Fully power? My you?re ambitious. I don?t recall ever suggesting that. Still, I suppose it makes your life easier just pigeonholing folk into stereotypes.
You really are an ass at times.
Tim
Thass not maffs its sums.
It isn't 200W per panel. It is in fact less.
And, the turnround efficiency of whatever you store summer energy to use in winter, is not 100%, or anything like it
That is what is being discussed. No fossil fuel
You manage that for yousreself perfectly
well at least its not all the time....
But that's supposed to be the plan, isn't it? Solar + turbines + batteries to be the entire solution. So how about you stop wriggling and specify how its gonna work.
And remember, if you have batteries to cover the not infrequent periods in winter (such as the 5-day period in Jan 2020 and 2.5 days or so in Nov 2020) when the wind doesn't blow, that once the 5-day period is over you now have flat batteries which you have to charge up. Using the entire grid that's gonna take - surprise! - 5 days, or 10 days at half power. During which time the country has to run on half power. How's that gonna work? And you better hope you don't get another blocking high during the ten or more days recharge period.
All a bit of a wing and a prayer, eh? And people wonder why some of us are pushing lots more nuclear.
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