Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Real world eV usage

I think ghat there are some 30 million vehicles on our roads and I suppose 15 to 20 million of these are private cars. It takes about 10 minutes to refuel an ice engined car. If it takes an hour to refuel an electric car the number of harchigpoits required is enormous. Am I missing something.

Nope, we are going to need cartloads of charging points.

Plus of course people will be driving much less as the costs increase.

Well we have cartloads of street lamps why not adapt them?

That's exactly what they are working on along with running cabling along underneath gutters so that cars can charge without cables snaking across payments. There may be other ideas that I don't know about.

Out of towns, the expectation is that most homes with off-street parking will have a charging point so that most charging will be done overnight.

Where’s all this additional electricity going to come from?

Exactly

I was told a few months that if a 1/3 of us switched to electric vehicles tomorrow - the National Grid would "trip out".

Apart from encouraging the further development of wind and solar, you mean?

3 new nukes, at Sizewell, Wylfa, and Bradwell in addition to the one under construction at Hinkley Point. Always assuming the investors can be found. EDF is stretched right to its limit by building Hinckley, and international capital is hard to attract to the UK at the moment (no prizes for guessing why).

An interesting illustration is that we would need to cover 1% of the UK's land area in solar panels to meet all our projected energy needs, which they reckon will be up around 410GW from the current 370GW or so.

Since about 2.3% of the UK is already covered by buildings, if we just put solar panels on everyones' roof we could have it cracked easily.

You were being told porkies. Not least because if we were to cut gasoline consumption by 1/3, the need to refine fuel would also drop by 1/3, releasing the enormous amount of electricity to be available for other things like charging EVs.

So, since the sun only shines during the daylight hours we need mega loads of batteries, so why no Gov support?

Because they are an attractive investment asset, there's no need. For overnight charging, there's actually loads of baseload volume available. It's the daytime peaks that are more problematic for the Grid to deal with, and EVs don't really hit that profile much.