We had a visitation from the Scottish and Southern Engineers over a couple of days during the week, because some people on the lane had a service failure.
It turned out that one of the 3 fuses between the transformer and the 240v supply was intermittently faulty, so they replaced all three.
I asked the engineer to explain why if we could pull close to 100A from the supply we could not put more than a few kw back and why the DNO had to approve all EV charger installations. His answer wasn't surprising, but was disappointing and confirmed my suspicions that those in Government who believe that Electricity can replace all fossil fuel use and CO2 release are, to put it bluntly, delusional.
Our electricity for 20 houses comes from one transformer that converts 11kv to 240v, 3 phase. Each phase is fused at 100 amps and the assumption is that even though each house on the phase could pull 80 amps they will never do so so the 100 amp fuse id enough.
Add EVs, replace gas with electricity and it would need household capacity to double a new transformer with at least 300A per phase which would, in turn, mean new cables and loop connection boxes. He told me that on our loop they would allow only two more home EV chargers.
As far as generating power and feeding it back to the grid the capacity of the grid to take additional power is limited by the same 100 amp phase fuses at the transformer. He commented that many applications by land owners to put PV arrays in place were declined simply because of grid limitation and the cost of infrastructure upgrading made the project unviable.
Overall in may rural areas the cost of infrastructure improvement to meet the demands of the "Green Revolution" will make the improvement of mobile phone signals and fast broadband look trivial and is unlikely to be achieved anytime soon. In my opinion whilst new pure ICE cars will not be sold the timeline for stopping the sale of plug in hybrids will slip, and slip, and slip simply because of the cost of infrastructure improvements will be prohibitive.
