Energy chat, the future of car propulsion

[Eric Bloodaxe]

3 hours ago, StephenFord said:

Crikey, I made the EXACT same comment some pages back,

Lol, I'm sure no-one questions your position as a leading electric sceptic, Stephen!😀

[Eric Bloodaxe]

Probably the wrong thread to post this, but I wonder if anyone on here has had an EV charger installed?

I was out for a walk with an old mate yesterday and our route took us through a "posh" village where we noticed lots of properties had EV chargers, some quite a distance from the house/garage.

So we were wondering what's actually involved. Presumably the connection has to be on the consumers side of the meter, but do they take it off the existing consumer unit or install a separate circuit breaker, etc?

Plenty of EV installers on the web but not a lot of detail on their sites as to what actually happens.

My friend is having an extension on his house shortly which will involve electrical work and was wondering if it might be worthwhile getting a charger installed while grants are available, as an additional se!ling point when/if they move. 

[unofix]

2 hours ago, Eric Bloodaxe said:

EV charger installed?

Like so many simple questions the answer is complex. It depends on the capacity of the supply to the building, typically 60Amp or 80Amp, if you are extremly lucky you might get 100A.

Then there is the consumer unit - does it have spare capacity, does it have filters fitted - and does it meet the new UK 18th edition standards. I could answer your question in full but two full pages of A4 is heavy reading.

Below are some links to YouTube videos that may be of intrest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5NsKgeAXXI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnmW6W9j80I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-HEKqeSrwk

One point to note which is, that although they are refered to as EV battery chargers they are in fact nothing more than a heavy duty outdoor socket with a remote controlled switch. The EV battery charger is part of the actual vehicle being charged and nothing to do with the socket.

 

 

[StephenFord]

15 minutes ago, unofix said:

The EV battery charger is part of the actual vehicle being charged and nothing to do with the socket.

You seem very knowledgeable on all this. Would you be able to shine any light on an earlier question I posted?

This evening as I looked over to my neighbours houses, one of them has 4 x cars, the other has 5. Now, when we're all 'electric' will they have to have multiple home 'chargers', or just run an extension lead from one charger to them all?

[Alex.S]

Ford in USA are advertising you could power your house from their latest F150. Plugging your house into your car rather than your car into your house..

 

[unofix]

Hello Stephen, are you sitting comfortably ? then we'll begin.

The first big problem for all homes is the incomming supply. Most (but not all) houses built after 1995 tend to have an 80Amp sevice fuse. So when adding electrical equipment to a house the exsisting load has to be taken in to account. If you have an electric Hob (32A), electric oven (25A), electric shower (40A), House ring mains (30A), light circuits (5A x 2) you can see the load is already way over the top of the 80A supply. Fortunately there is a thing called the diversity factor which is a calculated number, that basicly says not everything is going to be switched on and in use at the same time.

So now to electric vehicles. Most would like a supply of between 30A and 40A to be able to fast charge (Not rapid charge). The problem is now when you have 3 or 4 cars all wanting charged from the same supply at the same time the incomming supply could not cope with the demand and also continue to supply the house. At the moment the only company who are trying to address this problem is Tessla. They have smart sockets that talk to to each other and to the vehicles.

With the Tesla smart socket there is a current monitor fitted and also wifi. When a house has 4 charging sockets fitted and all of them are in use the system does a check. First all vehicles talk to the sockets and report the present state of charge. Next the sockets relay information between each other and back to the other vehicles. The system knows that the maximum current it can supply in total is say 40A. So the Tesla vehicle that needs the most charge will get for example 50% of the available supply. The other 3 vehicles will each get a percentage of whats left depending on the state of charge.

As each vehicles battery becomes more charged the vehicles will relay this infromation to the charge socket which will work out the best charging patten for all vehicles.

Hope that wasn't too long.

Feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to answer..

[Alex.S]

Have to be a spark with that knowledge?!

[unofix]

1 minute ago, Alex.S said:

Have to be a spark with that knowledge?!

Electrical / Electronic Engineer (Ex-Radar Test Engineer)

[StephenFord]

2 minutes ago, unofix said:

Hello Stephen, are you sitting comfortably ? then we'll begin.

Wow, what an amazing reply, thank you! I actually understood all of that. I have a very rudimentary understanding of electric supply from my physics 'A' level days LOL It's as I guessed, just as the government are crawling about with enormous 'battery car' infrastructure issues, home owners with multiple cars will also have their own issues charging up all their cars. Like we both said earlier, 'I told you so...''' will full up many a car forum with issues that don't seem to be heeded right now but are just waiting to happen.

Thanks again for such a detailed response, one I'm sure to cut & paste in future admonishment of this hilarious government policy to be the 1st to ban proper cars!

[Eric Bloodaxe]

1 hour ago, unofix said:

Like so many simple questions the answer is complex. It depends on the capacity of the supply to the building, typically 60Amp or 80Amp, if you are extremly lucky you might get 100A.

Then there is the consumer unit - does it have spare capacity, does it have filters fitted - and does it meet the new UK 18th edition standards. I could answer your question in full but two full pages of A4 is heavy reading.

Many thanks for some great information in your posts there, which confirms, as we suspected, that installing a charging point is, perhaps, a bit more complicated than the impression generally given.

I guess it probably is fairly easy in a recent build/refurbishment to latest standards, with good existing earth points, spare ways in the consumer unit and 100A supply, but older properties are likely to need a degree of uprating. Interesting that all the properties I referred to in my earlier post, plus the ones in my own village that have charging points, all looked to have have recent work done which no doubt included upgrading the electrics.  So it might make sense for my friend to have a point added while they're doing the work on his extension.

I'm sure I'd seen that EV points were to be made mandatory in new builds under revisions to the Building Regs, but don't know if it's actually happened yet?

 

[StephenFord]

23 minutes ago, Eric Bloodaxe said:

I'm sure I'd seen that EV points were to be made mandatory in new builds under revisions to the Building Regs, but don't know if it's actually happened yet?

 

I have just counted, in the 5 houses surrounding me, there are 22 cars in regular use - I guess that multiple EV points are really the way to go then. Just like a house built 50 years ago has 2 x single sockets in a room, whereas now there are numerous double/triple sockets!

[Eric Bloodaxe]

10 minutes ago, StephenFord said:

I have just counted, in the 5 houses surrounding me, there are 22 cars in regular use

Crikey, I thought it was bad enough near me with 2 or 3 at many houses! But yeah, looks like 1 charging point per house is not going to be enough if they all want to charge overnight.

[unofix]

Just to add a little bit extra excitement to the supply problem. The local infrastructure can not be cheaply, easily, or quickley upgraded.

Take a housing estate built in the 1990's with say 100 houses. The electrcity supply company put cables in the ground expecting that each house would have a service fuse of 80Amps and that a typical maximum load per house would be 50Amps for no more than 4 hours at a time (This how the diversity factor is calculated). So cable size and the capacity of the local sub-station were worked out using these assumptions.

Now if each house has only ONE electric car each, and most of those will want charged overnight we hit a problem. Each vehicle will want at least 30A each and charge time will be up to eight hours. Add on to that the exsisting load and you have potentially doubled the load on the supply cables to the housing estate and the local sub-station.

 

[Eric Bloodaxe]

16 minutes ago, unofix said:

Just to add a little bit extra excitement to the supply problem. The local infrastructure can not be cheaply, easily, or quickley upgraded.

Quite so. And the higher voltage transmission network is having to cope with entirely different power flows to only a few years ago, as wind, solar, etc take the place of fossil fuel fired power stations. Just down the lane from my house you get a distant view of what were the Aire Valley base load stations - Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax - only the latter of which is still operating (mostly on "environmentally friendly" imported woodchip).

[StephenFord]

mmm... now, if we only had a few more coal fired power stations to generate all this extra needed electricity 🤣

[Eric Bloodaxe]

28 minutes ago, StephenFord said:

mmm... now, if we only had a few more coal fired power stations to generate all this extra needed electricity 🤣

As I've reflected on here previously, the Aire Valley power stations sat almost next door to Kellingley Colliery ( "Big K" as it was known locally) the last deep mine to close in December 2015. 

But hey ho, life moves on. I still find it weird that virtually all traces of the mining industry that surrounded where I used to live have disappeared so quickly. Both my grandads were miners (and most of my ancestors, going back a couple of centuries). My paternal grandad died when I was young, but I remember my other grandad sitting with an enormous mug of tea, watching the comings and goings at the local colliery where he used to work, which was just across the road from his house. He'd moved there to help sink the pit in around 1910, but passed away before it closed.

[Eric Bloodaxe]

Having seen JCB pursuing hydrogen fuel in a modified diesel engine, rather than using batteries, I was interested to see that the rail industry is looking in that direction for freight locomotives:

https://www.gwrr.co.uk/news/freightliner-secures-government-funding-for-dual-fuel-project/

Quite a lot of other projects to use hydrogen fuel cells in passenger trains on non-electrified routes, as well as diesel hybrids which can run on battery power near stations to reduce urban pollution.

 

[StephenFord]

1 hour ago, unofix said:

Take a housing estate built in the 1990's with say 100 houses. The electrcity supply company put cables in the ground expecting that each house would have a service fuse of 80Amps and that a typical maximum load per house would be 50Amps for no more than 4 hours at a time (This how the diversity factor is calculated). So cable size and the capacity of the local sub-station were worked out using these assumptions.

Now if each house has only ONE electric car each, and most of those will want charged overnight we hit a problem. Each vehicle will want at least 30A each and charge time will be up to eight hours. Add on to that the exsisting load and you have potentially doubled the load on the supply cables to the housing estate and the local sub-station.

 

Dear Boris,

I may have discovered a flaw in your dastardly plan... It ain't gonna work. 🤣 Maybe the government should revert to their last mass transit energy plan of persuading us plebs that diesel is still the fuel of the future...

[unofix]

For those intrested in Electric Vehicle charging points take a look at this YouTube video. Its for North America but about 90% of it is true for the UK.

 

[Alex.S]

Looks like all new build houses in my area have solar panels. Luckily they seem to just need daylight rather than the elusive sunshine! Also a few miles away , what was when built (a decade or so ago) the biggest wind farm in Europe. I don’t have facts or figures about how much is generated unfortunately. But someone somewhere seems to have a plan. 

[Tizer]

57 minutes ago, Alex.S said:

Looks like all new build houses in my area have solar panels

That is because the Building Regulations up here have been a bit more onerous than the England and Wales ones and it is almost imposable to build a new house without some form of renewables and Solar Panels are the cheapest and easiest option at the moment, There are other other renewables that can be used but you would not normally see them. 

The rest of the UK will probably be doing the same shortly if they haven't already.

It all stemmed from an EU directive some time ago that Scotland decided to speed up the implementation of and although it is probably not binding, I can't see it being dropped. 

It was probably not implemented in the rest of the UK earlier because large house builders give political parties and MP's a lot of donations so when it comes to changing regulations they squeal like pigs and the politicians make sure they are kept sweet. It is a pity car manufacturers don't do the same😀  

[unofix]

Solar panels in Scotland !! what ever next wind turbines in the amazon ?

Its just a basic fact that the further North you go the less energy that can be got from Solar Panels. Anything north of Newcastle is just a pointless exercise. It will take 25 years just to recover the cost of them, and thats with no maintenance or breakdowns.

 

[Alex.S]

13 minutes ago, unofix said:

Solar panels in Scotland !! what ever next wind turbines in the Amazon ?

Its just a basic fact that the further North you go the less energy that can be got from Solar Panels. Anything north of Newcastle is just a pointless exercise. It will take 25 years just to recover the cost of them, and thats with no maintenance or breakdowns.

 

Won’t be long England will be needing our drinking water. Who holds all the cards in that situation? 

[Tizer]

4 minutes ago, unofix said:

Solar panels in Scotland !! what ever next wind turbines in the Amazon ?

Its just a basic fact that the further North you go the less energy that can be got from Solar Panels. Anything north of Newcastle is just a pointless exercise. It will take 25 years just to recover the cost of them, and thats with no maintenance or breakdowns.

 

I agree. It is worked out using a very complex calculation that takes absolutely everything into account and compares the theoretical energy usage and co2 emissions to a base line and this needs to be bettered in stages over the years.

One of the other things that counts is how airtight the house is, so about one in twenty on a large site are physically tested. That is why now our new houses need to have a Carbon Dioxide detector in the main bedroom (not Carbon Monoxide, which you need as well unless the house is all electric) because there is so little fresh air getting in that it could be harmful to health.

These detectors do not give an alarm, instead you can get a continuous readout of how bad the air quality is over the last week so that you can open your windows and negate any gains that having an airtight house can give you.

Unbelievable isn't it.  

[Eric Bloodaxe]

1 hour ago, Alex.S said:

Won’t be long England will be needing our drinking water.

Lol, if I'm having water from Scotland I'd rather have uisge beatha!😀