Author Topic: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?  (Read 15520 times)

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Online nctnico

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #50 on: February 14, 2020, 10:44:07 pm »
(F)Actual data is is totally absent. I did find some numbers elsewhere for average yearly household use in the Netherlands though: 2830 kWh. A car drives on average around 15000 km/y, so that’s around 2250 kWh. So the numbers are similar and do not differ by an order of magnitude. On average.
You don't understand the problem at all. This has nothing to do with averages but peak demand. The grid in a street is designed for a domestic load. This means that they fit a street with a transformer and wiring which is enough to feed all the homes at peak demand with some margin. Add some big extra loads and you'll see that the wiring can't handle the total load while the homes are at peak demand. Something has got to give. Even on the elaad.nl website it says 1 EVs is equal to the (peak) demand of 10 homes. The real challenge is to do the math to determine at what point the wiring is not enough to charge all EVs parked in a street sufficiently.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2020, 10:47:49 pm by nctnico »
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Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #51 on: February 14, 2020, 10:51:16 pm »
(F)Actual data is is totally absent. I did find some numbers elsewhere for average yearly household use in the Netherlands though: 2830 kWh. A car drives on average around 15000 km/y, so that’s around 2250 kWh. So the numbers are similar and do not differ by an order of magnitude. On average.
You don't understand the problem at all. This has nothing to do with averages but peak demand. The grid in a street is designed for a domestic load. This means that they fit a street with a transformer and wiring which is enough to feed all the homes at peak demand with some margin. Now when all the homes are near maximum usage the margin gets thinner. Now add some big extra loads and you'll see that the wiring can't handle the total load. Something has got to give. Even on the elaad.nl website it says 1 EVs are equal to the demand of 10 homes. The real problem is to do the math to determine at what point the wiring is not enough to charge all EVs parked in a street sufficiently.

As it says in the original AD article, peak demand is between 17.00 and 21.00h. No need for all cars to be charged during that time, and that is exactly the solution elaad.nl is promoting. Which has been talked about for years, smart charging, smart metering, it's nothing new. Investments in infra structure will have to be made, for sure, but it is nothing the grid cannot handle.

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« Last Edit: February 14, 2020, 10:53:25 pm by benst »
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Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #52 on: February 14, 2020, 11:24:08 pm »
More on smart metering for EV's: I thought I'd do a little spreadsheet test to see how this works out with some data from the Netherlands. See attached image.
928468-0
Netherlands average daily energy use w/o EV's is now ca. 8 kWh. I put in some guestimates how this is divided up over the day. This gave a peak power of 0.8 kW. So to keep everyone happy, adding an EV to this household should not increase peak power at any time. This leaves around 4.5 kWh of charge for the car, which is a range of 30 km. Average daily km here is around 40 km so it falls a bit short. But this is not an order of magnitude problem.

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« Last Edit: February 14, 2020, 11:26:50 pm by benst »
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Online nctnico

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #53 on: February 14, 2020, 11:30:34 pm »
Not enough is not enough. Also your calculation leaves zero margin and you accounted for only 1 car per household. At some point changing / expanding the wiring in the streets will be required. The costs for this operation will mostly be driven by the amount of labour involved so it doesn't really matter how big the problem is. It is going to be costly.
« Last Edit: February 14, 2020, 11:39:17 pm by nctnico »
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Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #54 on: February 14, 2020, 11:38:44 pm »
Not enough is not enough. At some point changing / expanding the wiring in the street will be required.

Oh please, that has been happening for the last 100 years. Plus, the average house around here has a 240 V 16 A 3 phase main fuses. (25 A optional for free.) That's 11.5 kW. Don't you think there's some overcapacity in the grid, compared to the 0.8 kW peak power in the spreadsheet I showed. Just the other week, the power co was increasing the power available here in the street. (A distribution box is in front of my house so I had a chat with them.) You know what they did? Upgraded the fuses in the distribution box.

Quote
The costs for this operation will mostly be driven by the amount of labour involved.

Ya think?

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Online nctnico

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #55 on: February 14, 2020, 11:42:11 pm »
Not enough is not enough. At some point changing / expanding the wiring in the street will be required.

Oh please, that has been happening for the last 100 years. Plus, the average house around here has a 240 V 16 A 3 phase main fuses. (25 A optional for free.) That's 11.5 kW. Don't you think there's some overcapacity in the grid, compared to the 0.8 kW peak power in the spreadsheet I showed. Just the other week, the power co was increasing the power available here in the street. (A distribution box is in front of my house so I had a chat with them.) You know what they did? Upgraded the fuses in the distribution box.
See my last edit. You only accounted for 1 car per household and your calculation leaves zero margin. Being able to upgrade the fuses is just anecdotal evidence. If it where so easy they wouldn't need to resort to limiting the power in Amsterdam for handling just a few EVs.
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Online bdunham7

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #56 on: February 14, 2020, 11:42:40 pm »

You don't understand the problem at all. This has nothing to do with averages but peak demand. The grid in a street is designed for a domestic load. This means that they fit a street with a transformer and wiring which is enough to feed all the homes at peak demand with some margin. Add some big extra loads and you'll see that the wiring can't handle the total load while the homes are at peak demand. Something has got to give. Even on the elaad.nl website it says 1 EVs is equal to the (peak) demand of 10 homes. The real challenge is to do the math to determine at what point the wiring is not enough to charge all EVs parked in a street sufficiently.

To solve that math problem you need some numbers.  I've no idea how they do things there, but I don't really need to.  The problem is the assertion that 1 EV is 10X the peak demand of a home--this is just silly, even if you can put forth some plausible calculation for it.  EV charging could be that much, but it certainly doesn't need to be.  7.2kW is plenty, 3.6kW will do for all but the truly dedicated commuter.  So are  you claiming that the peak household there is 720 watts?  Or are you using a DCFS number for the EV charging rate?

A 3.5 digit 4.5 digit 5 digit 5.5 digit 6.5 digit 7.5 digit DMM is good enough for most people.
 
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Offline Someone

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #57 on: February 14, 2020, 11:48:34 pm »
I have seen arguments that the conversion to EV's will actually lower the total power consumption. This is because to refine 1 liter of gasoline, it takes between 2 .. 5 kWh of electrical power. (Numbers I found online vary wildly, unfortunately.) There are some huge power plants next to the oil refineries here on the Maasvlakte in the Netherlands, for example.

Assuming a new EV replaces an ICE car, and assuming it takes 3.5 kWh to refine 1 l of gasoline, this means that:

Lots of assumption here, I know. Only part of the puzzle, but interesting. I do not think that generating power for all those EV's is the problem. Distributing it and making it conveniently accessible is.
This is wildly out, well to pump efficiencies of petroleum are around 80% and upwards, much of the energy to drive that process is "waste" byproducts of the process its self. You could make a pure electricity equivalent but that falls into the same trap as the car powered by petrol vs person walking powered by imported high emboldened energy foodstuff that happens to use a lot of petrol. Power plants co-located with refineries are because there is a large stream of low value/cost oil (by)products.

Not sure we're talking about the same thing? The power plants I mentioned are needed to power the refineries. Some are coal powered, some natural gas. Not byproducts of the process at all.

Ben
Your stated figure for the electricity "required" to produce petrol is nonsense, even taking the complete well to pump efficiency of the process (which include all sorts of energy inputs/losses) doesn't come up with that much energy use.

This much smaller amount of energy required is not even used as electricity, but other forms of energy input (for example a widely produced graph below).

Co-location of refineries and power generation is not because refineries use enormous amounts of power but because they can share low value products which would be expensive to transport, if its not low grade fuel then likely steam/heat.

Your estimate would have refining using 7x the total electricity use of all industry in the Netherlands, and more than the entire countries electricity consumption. Its plainly wrong and misleading to then use that for any sort of comparison or calculation.
 
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Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #58 on: February 14, 2020, 11:54:48 pm »
Not enough is not enough. At some point changing / expanding the wiring in the street will be required.

Oh please, that has been happening for the last 100 years. Plus, the average house around here has a 240 V 16 A 3 phase main fuses. (25 A optional for free.) That's 11.5 kW. Don't you think there's some overcapacity in the grid, compared to the 0.8 kW peak power in the spreadsheet I showed. Just the other week, the power co was increasing the power available here in the street. (A distribution box is in front of my house so I had a chat with them.) You know what they did? Upgraded the fuses in the distribution box.
See my last edit. You only accounted for 1 car per household and your calculation leaves zero margin.

Yes, the average number of cars per household in the Netherlands is... 1.

Quote
Being able to upgrade the fuses is just anecdotal evidence.

Doesn't matter, the logic in the 10 x power statement is still flawed. They must be assuming every EV has to charge at 11 kW (I assume, no data was provided.) I showed that this is hardly necessary.

Quote
If it where so easy they wouldn't need to resort to limiting the power in Amsterdam for handling just a few EVs.

In Amsterdam the average number of cars per household must be even less. Almost none of my friends living in Amsterdam own a car. (Yes, because there is no place to park them.)

Looking at my spreadsheet, during daytime (which I left at 0 kW in my example) more power is available for visitors etc.

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Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #59 on: February 15, 2020, 12:07:32 am »
Your stated figure for the electricity "required" to produce petrol is nonsense, even taking the complete well to pump efficiency of the process (which include all sorts of energy inputs/losses) doesn't come up with that much energy use.

This much smaller amount of energy required is not even used as electricity, but other forms of energy input (for example a widely produced graph below).

Co-location of refineries and power generation is not because refineries use enormous amounts of power but because they can share low value products which would be expensive to transport, if its not low grade fuel then likely steam/heat.

Your estimate would have refining using 7x the total electricity use of all industry in the Netherlands, and more than the entire countries electricity consumption. Its plainly wrong and misleading to then use that for any sort of comparison or calculation.

Thank you, that is certainly interesting information. Not talking WTP here. The energy needed to go from crude oil to gasoline I remembered was too high, if I search again I get around 6 kW / gallon = 1.6 kW / liter. This is apparently from US DOE figures, but I cannot find the original reference.

Does that sound more credible?

Can you tell me where you got the data for the 7 x total electricity use?

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #60 on: February 15, 2020, 12:15:58 am »

You don't understand the problem at all. This has nothing to do with averages but peak demand. The grid in a street is designed for a domestic load. This means that they fit a street with a transformer and wiring which is enough to feed all the homes at peak demand with some margin. Add some big extra loads and you'll see that the wiring can't handle the total load while the homes are at peak demand. Something has got to give. Even on the elaad.nl website it says 1 EVs is equal to the (peak) demand of 10 homes. The real challenge is to do the math to determine at what point the wiring is not enough to charge all EVs parked in a street sufficiently.

To solve that math problem you need some numbers.  I've no idea how they do things there, but I don't really need to.  The problem is the assertion that 1 EV is 10X the peak demand of a home--this is just silly, even if you can put forth some plausible calculation for it.  EV charging could be that much, but it certainly doesn't need to be.  7.2kW is plenty, 3.6kW will do for all but the truly dedicated commuter.  So are  you claiming that the peak household there is 720 watts?  Or are you using a DCFS number for the EV charging rate?
Its pointless to argue around and around without examples of the actual constraints to peak delivery. As example in Australia (What Drives Residential Energy Demand? An Investigation of Smart Metered Electricity Data, H Fan UNSW 2017) residential households are peaking at 2.1kW on 19kWh/day (both averages), much higher peaks are delivered without problem.

Assuming a car doesn't participate in balancing with delivering energy, and it only consumes as instructed there is 30kWh/day available per residential household without any increase in peak use. Commercial and industrial locations (where the commuters work) are another lump of available energy to consider. This all adds up to completely feasible from the delivery point of view when average distance per vehicle per day is less than 40km, and there are approximately 2 vehicles per household (figures come out just above or just below this depending on source). Even pushing the quantiles you'd see the vast majority of households would be accommodated with zero changes.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2020, 12:20:57 am by Someone »
 

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #61 on: February 15, 2020, 12:16:48 am »
Thank you, that is certainly interesting information. Not talking WTP here. The energy needed to go from crude oil to gasoline I remembered was too high, if I search again I get around 6 kW / gallon = 1.6 kW / liter. This is apparently from US DOE figures, but I cannot find the original reference.

Does that sound more credible?

Can you tell me where you got the data for the 7 x total electricity use?
If you can't be bothered to quote references for your data why should I do it for you?
 

Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #62 on: February 15, 2020, 12:22:37 am »
If you can't be bothered to quote references for your data why should I do it for you?

I assumed you had it handy as you posted a graph out of it.

As I said, I tried finding the original reference for my statement. I could only find secondary refs and the numbers varied a bit. It was not laziness on my part, sorry if I made that impression. As soon as I find it, I will amend my post.

Edit: Using the google instead of duckduckgo I think I found it, but am still trying to wrap my head around it:
https://greet.es.anl.gov/files/hl9mw9i7

Ben
« Last Edit: February 15, 2020, 12:28:34 am by benst »
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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #63 on: February 15, 2020, 01:49:52 am »
If you can't be bothered to quote references for your data why should I do it for you?

I assumed you had it handy as you posted a graph out of it.

As I said, I tried finding the original reference for my statement. I could only find secondary refs and the numbers varied a bit. It was not laziness on my part, sorry if I made that impression. As soon as I find it, I will amend my post.
Its all laziness on your part:
Power plants co-located with refineries are because there is a large stream of low value/cost oil (by)products.
Not sure we're talking about the same thing? The power plants I mentioned are needed to power the refineries. Some are coal powered, some natural gas. Not byproducts of the process at all.
I could spend hours getting all the geolocations of power stations in the Netherlands to pull that apart, but you're just putting up more vague nonsense without references that is expensive for others to verify. There is a gas power station right in the middle of the Rotterdam refinery complex, using....  a (by)product of refining. Your points miss the absolute fundamentals. You are free to show the list of co-located resources and their feedstocks to show how they are importing fuels.
 

Offline nigelwright7557

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #64 on: February 15, 2020, 02:07:33 am »
A lot of gas is spent idling in traffic. Ideally the efficiency of an electric will mean little to no electricity usage when standing still.

Mr car is start/stop anyway.
With a gas engine heat that would have been lost anyway can be used to heat the car instead.
With electric (here in UK where its usually cold) you need to use some battery power to keep warm.
At the moment there simply aren't enough charge points so  I will stick with my 2016 "clean" diesel for now.
At my last MOT my cars emissions were almost zero.
Diesel cars have moved on a long way in recent years.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2020, 02:09:50 am by nigelwright7557 »
 

Offline Someone

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #65 on: February 15, 2020, 02:30:30 am »
A lot of gas is spent idling in traffic. Ideally the efficiency of an electric will mean little to no electricity usage when standing still.
Mr car is start/stop anyway.
With a gas engine heat that would have been lost anyway can be used to heat the car instead.
With electric (here in UK where its usually cold) you need to use some battery power to keep warm.
Just because you can use a small portion of the waste heat from the combustion engine doesn't bring it anywhere near the energy efficiency of the pure electric alternative. There are sources for "real use" energy consumption figures:
https://ev-database.uk/car/1138/Tesla-Model-3-Long-Range-Dual-Motor
Even when needing to use significant energy for passenger comfort, the total energy use per km is still half when compared to an efficient diesel: 22kWh/100km vs 4l/100km or 40kWh/100km and thats only comparing the corner case of cold highway driving. For city driving the gap widens to the other corner where previous posters have been claiming the 5x advantage of electric cars over combustion, but all cases have the electric car using less energy overall.

Price and/or lifecycle costs (monetary or external/environmental) are much less separated, if at all.
 

Offline Red Squirrel

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #66 on: February 15, 2020, 06:09:42 am »
The biggest mistake people seem to make with EVs is they assume people are going to be depleting the entire battery every single day.  That is not going to be the typical use case.  Most people are using their cars to go to work and back, maybe go home for lunch.   For the most part a typical user will be able to just plug it into a regular 120v outlet and it will be topped up by morning.  Either way, most people will be charging at night when demand is low.

Either way, we pay for hydro service, it's up to the hydro companies to figure out how to provide the product if demand suddenly goes up.  It's like anything else.
 

Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #67 on: February 15, 2020, 10:39:05 am »
Its all laziness on your part:
You must have overlooked the reference I gave after editing the post. It sites 3-6% external electrical energy needed.
Quote
I could spend hours getting all the geolocations of power stations in the Netherlands to pull that apart, but you're just putting up more vague nonsense without references that is expensive for others to verify. There is a gas power station right in the middle of the Rotterdam refinery complex, using....  a (by)product of refining. Your points miss the absolute fundamentals. You are free to show the list of co-located resources and their feedstocks to show how they are importing fuels.
I'm sorry if I have upset you, and please do not spend hours getting all the locations. Here is a list of power plants on that specific location using coal and natural gas:

Coal, biomass: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_Maasvlakte and https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engie_Centrale_Rotterdam
Natural gas: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enecogen

I could not find any using byproducts of refining. I'm sure there must be as much re-use as possible, just couldn't find any refs.

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Online mikeselectricstuff

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #68 on: February 15, 2020, 10:50:21 am »
ISTR reading something recently from National Grid in the UK that consumption has been falling in the last few years due to energy saving lamps etc.  Their TL;DR was that there is no significant problem nationally, though there may be some local distribution that needs beefing up.
If & when V2G becomes a serious thing, EVs can help manage the grid more effectively.
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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #69 on: February 15, 2020, 11:07:00 am »
There was an interesting article on The Times website

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/confessions-of-an-electric-car-virgin-fq3lsz8tv

about driving a Nissan Leaf 1000 miles from London to Edinburgh and back. What was unusual was that it itemised the cost of recharging. Unfortunately the link seems to have lost this vital info, unless someone knows better.

But, he apparently spent £130 on electricity at charging points. This is a real sort of trip, not back home every evening. But £130 is serious, could do that in a petrol car for less, even my 3.9l Range Rover would only be twice that and carrying 400kg of load as well. Did 400 miles to Cardiff and back all in a 9 hour day, charging time? Twice in the garage for 10 minutes each time, petrol cost just under £100. So about 20mpg driving into a 50-60mph wind unladen, 400kg load back.

I don't commute, when an electric car would be fine, but make occasional long trips carrying a real load.

And does hydrogen work? I remember from years ago about storing hydrogen. The molecule is so small that it is near impossible to stop leaking, even with a metal to metal seal. Like hydraulics, over about 250 bar metal to metal won't seal, hence the O ring fittings, but an O ring won't seal hydrogen. Does anyone have any real knowledge of storing hydrogen they can share please?

For short journeys why not retrofit standard cars with lead acid batteries and one motor. Not trying to leave rubber on the road, just get to the local shops. Any number of cars to retrofit and lead isn't in short supply. And, lead can be recycled, unlike, according to my scrappy, lithium. Apparently putting a lithium battery in for recycling causes it to explode. I have seem 12 year old cars in the scrappy, why?, cam belt snapped so write off the whole thing. We can do a whole lot better than we are at the moment.


 

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Online nctnico

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #71 on: February 15, 2020, 11:24:42 am »
And does hydrogen work?
Yes. You can buy production hydrogen cars. Toyota expects to sell around 10.000 to 20.000 of their Mirai hydrogen car this year (forget the exact number but it is somewhere in that ball park).
« Last Edit: February 15, 2020, 11:26:24 am by nctnico »
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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #72 on: February 15, 2020, 11:30:12 am »
There was an interesting article on The Times website

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/confessions-of-an-electric-car-virgin-fq3lsz8tv

about driving a Nissan Leaf 1000 miles from London to Edinburgh and back. What was unusual was that it itemised the cost of recharging. Unfortunately the link seems to have lost this vital info, unless someone knows better.

But, he apparently spent £130 on electricity at charging points.

The article look interesting but is paywalled. £130 seems excessive but plausible. If he drove with a heavy right foot on motorways all the time and the heating on flat out he might get as little as 2.5 miles per kWh in a leaf (guessing here, I get about 3.7 in a Zoe in midwinter with a mix of urban and motorway driving). 1000 miles is then 400 kWh which would suggest he was paying £0.32 per kWh. That's perhaps believable if he only charged at those silly-expensive ecotricity-owned motorway chargers. Alternately he may be counting some other costs, like that a lot of charging networks require you to load a minimum amount of around £10 onto their app before you can use their chargers.

TLDR: I can believe he spent £130 but I think the journey should be possible at closer to £40-50.
 

Offline benst

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #73 on: February 15, 2020, 11:53:30 am »
There was an interesting article on The Times website

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/confessions-of-an-electric-car-virgin-fq3lsz8tv

about driving a Nissan Leaf 1000 miles from London to Edinburgh and back. What was unusual was that it itemised the cost of recharging. Unfortunately the link seems to have lost this vital info, unless someone knows better.

But, he apparently spent £130 on electricity at charging points.

As others have said, it is paywalled unfortunately. It would be interesting if you could post a bit more data from that article.

I often use http://abetterrouteplanner.com to get good guesstimates for my EV trips. If I enter a return trip in a 2018 40 kWh Leaf, I get a trip of 1289 km using 203 Wh/km = 262 kWh.  Charging is done on Chademo stations, like from the ecotricity.co.uk network. They charge 30p per kWh. (15p if you're already a customer apparantly.) So that adds up to 78.6 UKP. That is indeed a lot!

If you were to use a Tesla model 3 using the Tesla supercharger network, it would cost around 49 UKP according to the same site.

Quote
And does hydrogen work?

There are a few. A list can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fuel_cell_vehicles
They have been promised as the car of the future for many years, but I haven't seen them take of anywhere really.

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Online nctnico

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Re: The Electric Vehicle Future: Where is all the power going to come from?
« Reply #74 on: February 15, 2020, 12:40:57 pm »
There are a few. A list can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fuel_cell_vehicles
They have been promised as the car of the future for many years, but I haven't seen them take of anywhere really.
Well, last year Toyota sold 48 Mirais in the Netherlands compared to 10 in the years before. This year they expect to sell close to 200. That is pretty similar to when electric cars where first introduced. Give it time. I see myself buying a hydrogen car rather than an EV because I can't charge it from my own outlet and are likely to depend on whatever company is going to exploit the charging point in the street. A hydrogen car doesn't need a very dense infrastructure in order to be useable. In the (relatively small) city I live in there are 15 to 20 gas stations. If there is one hydrogen filling station nearby then that would be good enough to make a hydrogen car useful. Germany and Denmark seem to already have a useable hydrogen filling infrastructure. In the long run there will some competition too so the prices can't be jacked up to insane levels. Then again.. I expect my next car to be a hybrid in a couple of years.

 
« Last Edit: February 15, 2020, 12:48:14 pm by nctnico »
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