Congestion charge is another factor, all the places I know within the CC zone closed quite soon after as there was less traffic. When I lived in Clerkenwell the nearest was in Farrindon Rd, that closed and became a block of flats, the next nearest was at Kings Cross, but that closed and became, briefly, a restaurant -'the filling station'. After that the first place to fill up without a rout deviation was usually at Perivale, ten miles away.
And now everyone has a car anyway, just as easy for the customer to drive somewhere on the edge of town.
True. Anymore than you'd fill your petrol car up each and every night before your 5 miles commute.
Hmm. That is going to depend on how much it is used. No electric car currently on sale could have done my city commute to work for 2 weeks without charging. London is a very big place.
It's pretty much established that a good slice of London property is used to park money from overseas, um, investors. Quite how much is not known. Buy-to-let is about 15%.
For the 'normal' buyer, bigger mortgages as a proportion of income (from
2.5 x income in 1990 to almost 7 in 2015 - back to the 2007 peak. I'm not that sure on this figure, though), coupled with low interest rates.
For first item buyers, those with high enough salaries scrape together much higher deposits as a portion of income than they used to - over
100%, up from 25%.
Bit of a pack of cards, especially for the first time buyer. 3% interest on £400k is £1000 pcm interest only. When/if that goes up by 2%, £1650 pcm. It's only really those with secure salaries over £60k that can (barely) ride that sort of change. The BTL situation would also go weird
- yields are only 4% at current loan rates.
Some degree of sanity is suggested by the 50% owner occupation rate in London - lower then the c.62% UK average.
Benefit from the increased value of homes and inheritance are 2 of the most important variables that affect access to the housing market in London. Both will have a profound impact on how Britain will look in 20 years time.
How much waste heat does that produce though? I can see that for a thin shell of batteries well heat sinked you can push charge in at that rate but they get warm. If you have a big block of them those in the middle get too warm and damage results. The question is how big is too big?
For those of us who are not fully up to date with current and pipe dream battery technology a recent R4 episode of the bottom line gave some insight as to where technology might be in 5 or 10 years time.
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"Is battery technology the key to decarbonising energy and reinventing transport? If so, can the current technology, Lithium-Ion batteries, evolve quickly enough to meet growing demand. If capacity is the problem, is Lithium-ion the answer and what are the alternatives? Can we expect to fly in battery powered aeroplanes in the near future?
Join Evan Davis and his guests as they discuss the future of the power of batteries."
Quite interesting to observe one of those newish posh riverside blocks to see just how many have lights on in the flats of a dark evening. An elapsed time camera can even out people being out for the evening, or on holiday. And I doubt there are many shift workers living there. ;-)
Well Lithium Ion probably not but apparently the future is lithium sulphur, which results in a much higher energy density (5 times the energy density of lithium ion).
They also went into the use of "spent" vehicle batteries second life as household solar panel storage batteries before they need to be scrapped/recycled.
Yep. Having run out of options, a Sheffield researcher used the lights method to try and figure out which flats were occupied. I forget the number, but a fair few never lit up.
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