National Grid’s Thoughts on EVs

By Paul Homewood

forecourt-thoughts-v10.pdf

 

 

The National Grid has recently published what it calls a Thought Piece about the impact of electric cars on the electricity system.

It is not a hard and fast plan, but rather a bit of blue sky thinking. But it is certainly worth reading, not least because it only runs to five pages!

It starts by laying out the background:

So far, all pretty uncontroversial. It then goes on to look at some of the problems with home charging, which I have highlighted before.

 

 

 

 

The problems of no access to off road parking are very real, with an estimate of 43% having no such access. Just imagine somebody on the pavement tripping over your cable in the middle of the night and suing you!

Many people, of course, can’t even park outside their house. Even my car has to be left on the drive, as I have far too many uses for the garage, as I suspect is the case with the majority of people. So I would still have to resort to the open window.

It is also an eye opener to learn that you would not be able to use other household appliances with anything but the slowest of chargers.

It is also becoming abundantly clear that if large numbers of households started charging cars from home, many local networks simply could not cope. This has been reported from other sources before, but coming from the National Grid gives such claims much more credibility.

 

 

2050 Scenarios.

The analysis fast forwards to 2050, when it is assumed most, if not all, cars will be pure electric.

The report raises two very important considerations:

 

1) Charging times.

It talks about a 350 kW charger taking up to 12 minutes, but, as it admits, there is no battery at the moment which can support this. 12 minutes may not seem unreasonable, but just imagine when there are three other cars in front of you, and you have to wait half an hour.

In reality, with the sort of chargers currently practical, typically around 50 kW, charging times will be much, much longer.

(There is an interesting analysis by transportevolved,com, which finds that actual charging times are usually longer than the manufacturers state, dependent on things like the battery’s age and even the weather! The report is here.)

Let’s not be under any misapprehension here. We are not simply talking about inconvenience for car drivers. If cars are queuing up for half an hour or more, traffic jams will inevitably ensue. It is not difficult seeing the whole economy grinding to a halt.

Maybe 350 kW chargers will be compatible sooner or later, but again we come up against the chicken and egg problem. Nobody is likely to invest millions in installing these if there is little demand for them, so it could take years for them to make any significant difference. Meanwhile, drivers are unlikely to pay out more money for more powerful batteries, if there are no chargers available to take advantage of them.

And, of course, forecourts and service stations will already be full of the less powerful ones.

 

 

2) Chickens and eggs

Not only is this a problem for the 350 kW chargers. Much more significantly, as the report explains, drivers will be reluctant to buy EVs until there are enough charging stations, readily available right across the UK.

Meanwhile, there is little appetite to build them until there are enough cars on the roads to make them worth while.

The likely eventuality is that we see a continuation of the piecemeal approach, with small numbers of charging sites set up, probably limited to the busier locations, such as motorways and cities. Whilst this may be enough to satisfy the current handful of EV drivers, it is unlikely to reassure the rest.

 

 

Final Thoughts

The report concludes:

It has long been widely assumed by the “experts” that most EV charging would take place at night, thus smoothing out demand each day, and reducing the need for peak capacity. It has also been planned that car batteries could act as storage for the grid, so that power could be taken away during times of shortage.

This National Grid analysis comes to rather different conclusions. It now seems that, far from smoothing out demand, EVs could exacerbate the problem.

Most drivers will take their cars for charging during the day, and probably most will do so on the way home from work. In other words, precisely the time when demand in winter is already at its peak.

We are launching ourselves towards arguably the most radical transformation of our energy system, and indeed economy, yet with little understanding of how we are going to get there, or an appreciation of the problems involved.

Instead we are going forward on a wing and a prayer, in the hope that something will eventually turn up.

Needless to say, this is the opposite of every successful technological advance made in the past. Just about every such move forward has come as a result of finding something that was something an improvement of the past, an evolutionary process.

Just think about the progression in computer technology for instance. Did governments announce that all manual records would be done away with, in the hope that something might replace them? Of course not.

IT companies like IBM came up with ideas and technologies that were better, then rolled them out and proved that they were both up to the job and much better solutions than those which already existed. And none of this happened by government mandate or subsidy.

One of these days, EVs might do the same. But until they do, we really should not be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.