Revealed: The hidden cost of going green
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Homeowners are being charged thousands of pounds to upgrade their electricity supplies so that they have enough power to charge an electric car and run a heat pump.
People trying to switch to greener forms of heating already face costs to install alternatives and improve the insulation of their homes.
Gas boilers and petrol cars are set to be phased out under the Government’s net zero plans.
But environmentally conscious householders are being penalised with eye-watering bills to upgrade their power supply amid concerns about the network’s ability to cope with a growing reliance on electricity, The Telegraph can reveal.
Many older homes in the UK have an electrical service of 60 or 80 amps, but 100 amps is standard for newbuilds and is usually seen as a requirement for anyone who wants to install a car charger. For homes that need even more power, three-phase supplies can be installed.
‘Hang on a minute, my home can’t deal with this’
Gino Pooley, 59, a retired engineer from mid-Wales, enquired about improving his electricity supply to three-phase to enable him to install chargers for his family’s two vehicles and a heat pump.
He was sent a letter from his distribution network operator, SP Power Networks, stating that the work would cost £14,678 and has abandoned plans to install a heat pump.
He said: "Having your first charger, with a gas boiler, it won’t affect you. But it will start affecting people nearer the time when they are going to be really pushed to go electric and [get] heat pumps. Then they are going to start realising – hang on a minute, my home can’t deal with this."
Laurent Schmitt, the chief executive of smart home startup dcbel, who previously worked on electricity grids in Europe, said most UK households could not handle the electricity demand of car charging and heat-pump heating at the same time.
"If you have your normal electricity appliances, plus an electrical car charging at a decent speed – the standard is around seven kilowatt – plus a heat pump, then you would already exceed this 100 amps," he said.
Faster car chargers that provide 11kw charging can be installed in 100-amp homes, but there is a risk of putting too much demand on the system if other electrical appliances are used at the same time, leading to blown fuses and blackouts, experts said. Extra chargers add to this risk.
Electric car drivers have also been quoted hundreds of pounds to upgrade their power systems from 60 or 80 amps to 100.
Ben Nelmes, the head of policy at NewAutomotive, a transport research organisation, said: "Some of them will charge an absolute fortune – or worse they’ll refuse to do it.
"People will sign a lease on an electric car, they’ll call up their electricity supplier and say: ‘I want to have an electric car, I want home charging, I need to upgrade my fuse box.’
"The electricity supplier will then ring up the distribution network operator, and the distribution network operators sometimes say no. And that causes chaos for people, which is really bad – they’re trying to do the right thing and switch to an electric car."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/environment/2022/01/02/revealed-hidden-cost-going-green/
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Oh dear, what a shame
Never mind.
“Many older homes in the UK have an electrical service of 60 or 80 amps…”
Our house was built in the 1960s and our meter is rated at only 40A, though we do also have gas (Methane).
There is starting to be quite a bit of kick back to Net Zero in the newspapers over the last few days.
People are waking up to it and are not happy, long may it continue.
It’s the same on Talk Radio.
Richard Tice and Mike Graham are both exposing the madness behind Net Zero.
Mike Graham might appreciate a daily feature to undermine the belief.
10am to 1pm most weekdays https://talkradio.co.uk/
Yes it appears that the media is beginning to wake up. Having had a field day getting Clickbait income from Climate Change with scary stories which are now getting a bit boring; here we have a really scary story to get their teeth into. Really scary as it is actually happening now🤯
Come on you journalists and editors – Go to it and give us the real information about this dangerous Zero emissions policy. No more pussyfooting around please.
Simple questions . . .
R 30 is the insulation value of 6″ walls for houses . . . What is the R value of the triple glazed, all glass office towers or condos in down town London ?
R 8.
If the transmission of Electricity is so ‘efficient’ why do trains have diesel engines on board producing electricity to run the electric motors that ‘drive’ the wheels ?
About 15 % of the electricity sold to the railway would be lost on the way to the train. It is way more economical to produce on-board.
https://www.academia.edu/52039545/All_Electricity_Poisons_Planet_Earth
How much CO2 will the Paris Accord remove from total annual CO2 added to the Global Environment ?
0.6 % . . . Humans contribute 3 % by burning fossil fuels . . .
97 % . . . Comes from Nature . . . Forest fires, Volcanoes, animal farts . . . The Oceans, termite mounds, decomposing plant material . . .
https://www.academia.edu/49537285/Climate_Change_A_fresh_Perspective
None of these things have been reviewed by The Media or by Government Bureaucrats . . . They are too busy fighting off the incessant assault coming from the ‘Richly Financed’ and ‘Highly Connected’ leaders of ‘The Big Green Propaganda Machine” who are bent on destroying the ‘Moguls’ that profit from ‘poisoning’ the planet with Fossil Fuels.
However . . . among them there is no common sense in sight . . .
Scrubbers and Electrostatic Converters remove over 90 % of the effluent from burning coal . . . who advocates a clean up ? Why Not ? This has been done at Belldune New Brunswick, Canada . . . they even make drywall from the Ash scrubbed from the chimneys . . . Environmentalists still want the plant shut down because it burns coal . . . They WILL NOT recognize Clean Energy coming from Fossil Fuels . . . Shameful double standard . . .
Ignorance blissfully rules our world . . .
Journos aren’t the best paid and they are probably waking up themselves to how much this is going to cost them.
More grist to the mill. I am sure that the Daily Mail would be interested to know what the gross cost of a new boiler, a heat pump and a car charger ( + ? £s of others) is at even today’s prices. Constant application to this pressure point should force reality out into the open.
few years ago when NetZero was first mentioned, I costed to have our very modest EOT, 3 bedroom, solid masonry Victorian cottage dressed up to comply with the proposed regs.
We have a big garden so I priced for a Ground Source Heat Pump rather than an Air Source Heat Pump.
To fully insulate (internally) the walls, loft, install high performance double glazing, upgrade the radiators (which are, frankly, massive) and install whole house mechanical ventilation (essential to resist stagnant air and consequent mould) was £100,000+. Nor did I cost for a new kitchen and bathroom that would all have to be ripped out for the insulation and plasterboarding etc.
Whole house ventilation is almost impossible to retro fit even were the cost of ripping up floors for trunking etc. acceptable.
Even then, the guy selling £30,000 of GSHP was honest enough to tell me that no matter what I did, the house would never be warm, it could never be made airtight enough.
I was pleased to see I wasn’t alone in this estimate when Professor of Engineering Michael Kelly did the same exercise on a national basis and reached the figure of £75,000 – £100,000 to retro fit houses with all the gubbins.
Nor did I include upgrading our electricity supply, almost pointless though as we don’t have off street parking, like 45% of the country. The only way I can drive anything mildly electric is a self charging Hybrid, which is, crudely, a regular car with a 48 volt battery thrown in it.
All in all, I would expect NetZero to cost me around £150,000 over the coming years, assuming I last that long.
The only people making money from all this are the suppliers and the Banks who will have people forced to take out ridiculous loans breaking down their doors.
Is there not an opportunity for an investigative journo to make a reputation through the ELECTRICITY landscape with all its distortions and rip offs?
Sadly, to date, no self-respecting Media Representative wants to risk the Ire of their Peers or the Mandarins ruling the Environmental Movement or The Purveyors of Globalization in our New Social Construct. For they are ‘Brothers-in-Arms’, so to speak. Who wants to be the ONE to open Pandora’s Box? . . . It would be like pulling Hans Brinker’s finger from the Dyke or Killing the Goose that Lays the Golden Egg . . . The old adage . . .
There are none so blind as those who will not see . . .
No-one has contradicted Lord Lawson in the Spectator recently:”decarbonisation will bring an unparalleled economic calamity”.
Meanwhile CO2 will continue to rise inexorably at c. 2ppm a year and the idiosyncratic shape of Moana Loa’s sawtooth unaffected by Greta or Covid or Boris. Mark my words
Amps times volts = watts. Even here in Kent (hardly the back of beyond) my supply is fused at only 60amps so the maximum I can draw is 15kW. I have mains gas for heating, hot water and cooking (hob and double oven) so if you take gas away I would require not only a heat pump but also an electric cooker. I would need a minimum of an 11kW ASHP to heat the house ( though probably a 15kW to be safe). So if I add a basic 7kW EV charger…..oops no go even before I’ve switch on the cooker.
In fact it even seems it would likely be a push even on a 100 amp supply (24kW) given that there are other electrical requirements. The lunatics really have taken over the asylum.
“householders are being penalised with eye-watering bills to upgrade their power supply ”
They’re not being penalised! They’re discovering that they, and they alone, are responsible for paying the capital cost of having an electricity supply sufficient to meet their self-determined increased needs.
Joe, I fail to see how these costs are ‘self-determined’ considering the unelected CCC wants to make them compulsory.
Harry, I think that Joe is making your point. The word ‘penalty’ implies that the distributor is charging more than the real cost when, as Joe says, it is actually the true cost. At present, this situation only applies to people considering voluntarily hurling themselves into the pit, and so ‘self-determined increased needs’ is accurate.
You are right of course that when and if this all becomes FORCED, it will no longer be ‘self-determined.’ But, in a further twist, at that time it would jolly well serve a person right to suffer, if that person had espoused the religion.
Hi Dave & Harry
Thanks Dave, you’ve explained my point as intended.
Almost as if government haven’t thought this one through properly.
Endless upgrades, unexpected costs, knock-on consequences and so on. Surely our fabulous planet-saving leaders couldn’t have been so short-sighted? I find that very hard to believe.
Back of an envelope calculation shows the plan to be unachievable unless use is restricted by time of day pricing. The poor will freeze. I left this more detailed comment on the telegraph. But I only briefly touched on diversity factor, it will just be impossible for everyone to charge overnight, you might be able to get some power about 25% of the time, but at a high cost. There is also the problem of phase balance, the neutral wire is not big enough to handle the imbalance. When people are freezing they do desperate things and meter tampering will become common, particularly in run down urban areas. We are heading for a third world economy.
Average daily consumption of electricity in a standard size home is just under 10kWh per day (OFGEM use 8.5 kWh when they calculate the cap) Now your 5kW heat pump, which will give out less than half the heat of a gas boiler so has to run 24 hrs per day will use on one day in winter 120kWh. Charge your electric car say a Nissan leaf with a 40kW battery, just half lets say, is another 20kWh. so that is an additional 140kWh per day, some 14 times the present demand. The existing local distribution system also depends on diversity factor, that is all of the people do not boil the kettle or tumble dry at the same time. So every home in the land is going to need a new connection to a new local substation OR, as I think, it will be regulated by smart meters meters controlled by the local sub station, those that can pay will get electricity the rest will freeze. All this because of the myth that global warming caused by carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is going to destroy the planet. Greens are are really not very good for mankind.
It’s your last but one sentence that sums it up perfectly.
I don’t. I suspect a lot of Boris’s sudden conversion to ‘saving the planet’ is driven by his new wife who is an eco nut. The costs of saving our 1% of the planet’s Co2 emissions is ludicrously high, and completely unplanned for. If they’d had the foresignt to start installing small nuclear reactors ten years ago, or facing down the eco loonies over fracking, we’d be in a far more sensible situation today.
Would it be impractical to fit heat exchangers onto domestic gas system exhausts so as to use that waste for power extraction, if only for household hot water?
Yes, it would be impractical, and also unnecessary.
Modern domestic gas boilers already scrub out as much heat as possible from the products of combustion. That’s why the water vapour condenses. They have an Energy Related Products Directive ErP of at least 92%.
https://energyguide.org.uk/what-is-erp/
I agree, but there is also such a thing as a gas-powered heat pump. It uses a small gas engine to drive the heat pump compressor and the waste heat (at high temperature in the exhaust gases) can be used for hot water. Why are these gadgets not marketed in the UK?
Hi KB
Gas-fired heat pumps have been / were available in the UK at least 45 years ago. Albeit for commercial premises. (Gas-fired fridges even longer – anyone old enough to remember the Mr Therm newspaper ad “The flame that cools”?)
BEIS published “EVIDENCE GATHERING – LOW CARBON HEATING TECHNOLOGIES Gas driven heat pumps” in 2016.
Click to access Gas_Drive_heat_pumps.pdf
There’s this decade-old CIBSE journal “Gas-absorption heat pumps”
https://www.cibsejournal.com/cpd/modules/2010-10/
But if eco-zealots are intent on destroying the natural gas industry, few manufactures are spending on R&D.
2029.
Buy myself a new 3.0 litre 4×4. Either a Grenadier or a Toyota HiLux twin cab.
Should last me towing our Airstream for at least a decade.
By which time I’ll be 76 and probably not towing anymore.
Exactly my thoughts, just not towing.
However, one of my neighbours only gave up towing in his late 80’s.
‘Homeowners are being charged thousands of pounds to upgrade their electricity supplies so that they have enough power to charge an electric car and run a heat pump.’
Doesn’t matter. No need to worry about the hidden cost when the visible cost is existential. You WON’T HAVE A JOB.
“Hidden” ??? Not sure the costs are well hidden !! We will be paying “shed loads” of money for this stupid idea and to keep the morons who believe it in “a job” ???
I live in a block of 15 flats with communal parking. We would have to upgrade the existing puny outdoor lighting circuit to mega amps, install 10-15 charging points, PLUS install a system (yet to exist) that will allow a PIN code to be entered to allocate the recharge cost to the right flat.
Totally off topic but surely this is taking things too far?
Climate change: Living by coal tip leaves family fearing rain
Every time it rains, Phil Thomas is beset with worry and anxiety after finding out his young family are living below a potentially dangerous coal tip.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-59653955.amp
Hasn’t the the problem of coal beings above villages in the Welsh valleys and heavy rain been known since before Aberfan? In fact I watched something on TV within the last few weeks on how the NCB did their best to avoid blame and paying for the removal of existing tips and forcing the relief fund to pay for the remains of the Aberfan tip.
And what about the local supply network? Existing ones are unlikely to be sized to cope with delivering 100+ amps to houses.
Can’t wait for proponents of micro-grids to realise the implications of actually being insulted from the National Grid
Bugger! Autocorrect was in Freudian mode. “insulated”
You were right first time!!
https://www.netzerowatch.com/britains-electric-car-strategy-is-doomed-to-failure/
https://www.thegwpf.org/publications/net-zero-every-urban-street-and-front-drive-will-be-dug-up/
https://www.netzerowatch.com/new-paper-decarbonisation-plans-fail-engineering-reality-check/
https://www.netzerowatch.com/gwpf-welcomes-recognition-public-has-been-misled-over-net-zero-costs/
Great articles, thank you
How Much Electricity is Wasted To Charge Electric Car Batteries?
OHM’s Law . . . Basic Physics . . .
Resistance from Uploading, Transmitting, distributing and Charging Electric Cars.
12 % Uploading, Transmission and Distribution
16 % Charging the Electric Car Battery
28 % Is Lost as HEAT . . .This IS the Environmental Cost!
The Untold Story . . . WHY Promote and Subsidize Electric Cars ?
WHY Do We Pay for Rich People’s Toys ?
Who is going to stand up? Stop the Madness . . .
STOP . . . ‘The Big Green Propaganda Machine’
Electric Cars cause least 15 % MORE CO2 to be Produced than Gas Cars . . .
https://www.academia.edu/62574334/Tesla_Versus_Toyota_Camry
I remember in my childhood we had to be careful not to run an iron and a heater on the same circuit or it blew the fuse. I have no desire to go back to those days, thankyou!
Yes we had the same problem, until my dad replaced the fuses with a nails.
Oddly some walls then got hot when the iron, fan heater and the (valve) radio were in use.
Just to add to the problem, how many households have only one car? I know plenty that have three or four. A family of two adults and two children all at work means charging for four cars! It’s not going to work, is it.
How many households don’t have a driveway? ~45%.
I don’t and we had four cars parked on the street. With EV’s I have to get power to them all. How is that accomplished? Lamp posts all running on 240v?
But we have far more cars on our street than lamp posts, so do we all cluster cars around lamp posts? In which case there will be cables strewn across the pavement, an open invitation to our travelling brethren for some nice copper.
Or are streets and pavements to be dug up to provide dedicated charging parking for cars. But whose?
Now I don’t care what the green loonies say about people only travelling an average of 10 miles per day so they won’t need to charge their cars every night. If it takes several hours to charge a car from a half charge, you can bet that people will plug them in at every given opportunity to top them up.
The whole thing is a 100 year evolution, not 20 years of revolution. And EV’s have to be attractive with short charging times etc. before the public generally accept them.
BTW 3 cars passed me when I was waiting to cross the road today. One Tesla and two modern ICE cars. Guess which was the noisiest……Yep, the Tesla, by a big margin. It was all road noise undoubtedly generated by dragging around half a ton of batteries instead of a lightweight aluminium, turbocharged engine with a steadily decreasing fuel load.
Lived in inner city Bristle for many years. Roads not built for cars in the first place. Many households had more than one. If you go to park on the road you lived on you’d done well.
We really ALL need to stop voting.
Don’t be silly – you won’t be allowed more than one car and then only if you can prove a need – the sheeple, you included, are all going to use public transport, bicycles or Shank’s mare as everybody will be determined to save the planet from an imaginary small increase in temperature…
I do not understand all this.
Anyone who subscribes to this nonsense gets what ever they deserve,
I have no intention of getting one of these Scalectric vehicles. I intend to run my 2 litre Astra Diesel for at least another 11 years. After all it has only 70,000 miles on the clock
My gas boiler works fine, even if it is one of those John ( 2 Jags) Prescott useless models.
I have no intention of getting one of these Stupid Meters (which the suppliers call Smart Meters)
In our block I am responsible for the utilities. This week I was informed by Southern Electricity that the electric supply was being transferred to some mickey mouse outfit called Ovo. (are they ovulating?).The result was that our bill went up by 25%
So I say bolloks to all this jobbies.
Being an Vauxhall, it won’t last that long.
Scalextric is actually a better system than EVs because it has continuous power and not batteries. Those crossover points would be fun.
Are clockwork cars a future option? The key would have to be removable of course.
There’s a guy lives near us in rural Somerset, known as Roadkill Dave (for obvious reasons, we’re still pretty Hilllbilly down this way). He’s got an ancient Bristol car, battered and bruised. On the capacious boot, is a LARGE key 🙂
Insane journey to serfom. The onslaught of carbon zero; green agenda, colossal costs of all electric, the impossible becomes obligatory, it must be planet bonkers or, the United Kingdom. “you will own nothing and be happy”. believe in boris, klaus, bill, greta and george.
We know that the Covid crime is fully linked to the Climate crime. Viruses & CO2, both invisible bogeymen used by lying globalists to terrorize the world’s population, and ultimately, designed to isolate & impoverish them.
Stay home, don’t communicate, don’t holiday, don’t fly, ditch man’s greatest inventions – fossil fuelled vehicles & power stations. Below are the true costs, and they haven’t yet told us about their plans to get us to insulate our homes. But don’t worry, when we can’t pay, they’ll do it for free so long as you hand over your home to the government. Hey presto, “You’ll own nothing & be happy.”
Way past time to wake up.
An electric car seems reasonable until you realize that if you drive ~30 miles or 45 km/day the number of kilowatt hours of energy consumed to charge simply for daily use is about half as much as the daily electrical use for an entire house. 2 drivers going similar distances would double the amount of energy used by each home. But there is a desire to also electrify home heating where electric consumption in the winter just for heat would also be just as large as normal household electrical consumption in the spring and the fall. It is flat out remarkable that no one seems to do the simplest arithmetic. The electric generation can’t meet the demand nor can the distribution network.
Yep, the UK National Grid warned 3 years ago that if there were to be any significant move to EV’s, it would require more than Hinkley 2, and isn’t even planned. Catastrophically absurd.
Hinkley Point C when it comes online in 2026 will be 3260MW. Unfortunately since construction started Dungeness B (1000MW) shut down last year as did half of Hunterston B (500MW), the other half (500MW) closes by the end of this month. By the end of August this year Hinkley Point B will lose so another 1000MW going. And then in 2024 both Hartlepool and Heysham 1 both close so another 2100MW going. So we will be getting in 2026 new nuclear of 3,260MW having closed 5,100MW of existing plants.
Can you see a problem!
Modern day joined-up thinking ! Shocking, but we’ll be OK because Boris wants everyone to have their personal windmill 😂
You are correct ! However, what ever the demand increase is, you need to add at least 28 % more than that to cover the losses in transmission and charging those electric car Batteries.
https://www.academia.edu/49057069/Electric_Cars_Burn_31_More_Energy_than_Gas_Cars
https://www.academia.edu/62574334/Tesla_Versus_Toyota_Camry
OHM’S Law CAN NOT be subverted . . . not even by MAGIC . . . or by Environmentalist propaganda.
100 amps is likely not enough for a modern home that is being pushed toward greater electrical usage. I have a totally electric house with a modern heat pump. The service is rated at 200 amps. {Not fuses in USA: Virtually all homes built since the early 1960s use circuit breakers as the power distribution method.}
Heat pumps need electricity. At low temperature, resistance coils do the heating. I have a wood stove as an emergency source of heat. Is there any part of the UK that would not need emergency heat not using electricity? And also, of course, wood!
In the last few days our temperature was 0°F or -17.8°C.
Because electrical resistance heat is expensive, I’ve used a lot of wood since early December.
We’re in rural Somerset, England. Yes it’s been a mild winter, but we now only put the central heating (oil fired) on to take the nip off in the morning. Else the woodburner is used. Works out cheaper than lecky. As for EVs for rural motorists – why do we keep electing morons?
Doesn’t the US run at a lower voltage – 110, iirc?
My understanding of electrickery is modest but, if you are on 110v, isn’t a 200A rating roughly equivalent to 100A here?
In response to europeanonion, they are called “gas savers” and are frequently used in new homes as they give brownie points in SAP. Paired with a combi boiler the flue gas heat recovery is used to preheat the water going into the boiler. Ideal boilers does a boiler with it built in.
Can anyone hazard a guess why so many planning applications for solar farms with a capacity =>50mw are current? One that I’m objecting to must need >£150/mwh to break even throughout the next 40 years. The developer, by the way, reckons that sheep will keep the grass down around 100,000 panels over 200 acres. Not the blighters in Devon who will “re-arrange” everything to their liking.
With the amount of shade, the whole point of Solar PV is that it removes solar energy, grass will be in short supply. Moss and brambles are more likely.
You Limeys are sitting on massive Solar Energy! Yes it is in the form of Methane but it was formed by the Sun. You have been brainwashed by Pootin to think it is wrong to pursue these resources so he can keep his market monopoly. Natural gas (methane) is at least a great transition fuel as proven by the CO2 reduction achieved by the US. It is quite nice also when the power fails…….Oh and you have oil in them thar hills as well…….
Sum one at the DT has learned how to do sums. This is so blatantly obvious I was rather hoping that the government would find out one day before we find the MP’s being hung around in the streets.
Ross Clark has quite a good piece in the Mail on most of the subsidies for greens, unfortunately slightly marred by a couple of inaccuracies. It’s going to be very important to be accurate if criticisms are really going to hit home.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10366275/ROSS-CLARK-DOES-green-tax-energy-bill-actually-pay-for.html
“Ross Clark has quite a good piece in the Mail on most of the subsidies for greens, unfortunately slightly marred by a couple of inaccuracies.”
What’s two orders of magnitude between friends? It’s not even the common kWh/MWh ‘typo’ 😉
“Climate Change Levy
This is a straightforward tax on the burning of fossil fuels — paid by owners of gas and coal-fired power stations, and other industrial users.
The levy is 46p for every kWh of gas and 78p for electricity generated by fossil fuels, and raises £2 billion annually.”
There is a letter in today’s Times from a Michael Grubb, Professor of energy and climate change, UCL and chairman, government’s advisory panel on electricity market reform 2016-19. (Clearly no beneficial interest there, then). He says the consumer is paying three to four times the cost of generating electricity from new wind and solar and that the cost of balancing the system is only a modest add-on. He blames the high prices on the cost of gas and advocates accelerating expansion of “cheaper low-carbon electricity”, particularly wind energy, “of which onshore is the cheapest of all.” There is no mention of subsidies or the consumer having to pay for these things when the wind doesn’t blow. It is noticeable that people and comments like this appear regularly in The Times and are never questioned, yet input from the likes of Paul and Net Zero Watch are given no platform and quite possibly no consideration. I am also willing to bet that Grubb lives nowhere near an onshore wind subsidy farm.
“Michael Grubb, Professor of energy and climate change, UCL and chairman, government’s advisory panel on electricity market reform 2016-19.
….He says the consumer is paying three to four times the cost of generating electricity from new wind and solar and that the cost of balancing the system is only a modest add-on.”
As Andrew Montford informs:
“Latest data on the cost of the Balancing Mechanism is out. Not a pretty sight…”
Just a ‘modest’ ~£2,200,000,000 for 2021. Pocket money to professors no doubt, but about £78 per year for each household.
This article understates the upgrading needed. When every house has an EV and a heat pump, the cables which supply the power and the area transformer also need upgrading. The cables and transformers supplying area transformers need upgrading. In fact it needs the entire National Grid to be rewired and re-equipped and connected to more power sources. This would be a gargantuan task of unprecedented proportions far exceeding GDP. The National Grid grew organically over the course of more than a century. Like Rome, it wasn’t built in a day.
All covered in the four GWPF papers I linked to above. Worth storing and printed. I chuck them at Greenies I have to deal with in our PC and local district council. Their response “But who funds them?”.
Commentary that is LONG over due . . . PLUS . . . an additional 10 – 15 % for line loss, OHM’S law . . . Plus an additional 16 % minimum . . . for every KWH of demand for Electric Cars . . .
https://www.academia.edu/62574334/Tesla_Versus_Toyota_Camry
I have a solution to the problem of suppling enough electricity to e-cars.
Instead of up-grading the electricity grid, the household switch boxes (and the cables) and trying to find a solution to those without off-road parking space for recharging, I suggest that all car owners be issued with a diesel generator which they can use anytime they like.
No connection overloads, no flat batteries in the morning and if they can find space in the boot a solution to range worries.
You can see a picture of one of these Diesel chargers on Page seven (7) of
https://www.academia.edu/49057069/Electric_Cars_Burn_31_More_Energy_than_Gas_Cars
Unfortunately 16 % of the Electricity produced by that generator is wasted as HEAT exciting the electrons inside the Lithium Ion battery.
Environmentally, it would be ‘Cleaner’ and less harmful to the Environment to drive a diesel Car . . .
Strange how these ‘facts’ get brushed under the rug by Propaganda . . .
There’s nothing “hidden” about it. A first year engineering student can tell you the foreseeable problems and costs associated with ‘going green’.
Markl,
unfortunately for us, the public is continually told that electric cars and heat pumps are green because they are fed by ‘green’ electricity, except they are not. It is a lie that presumably the government and it’s advisors are pushing?
Overall they will not reduce CO2 emissions so we are being forced to spend a lot of money for no return. Until we have largely nuclear electrical supply, which can’t happen overnight, and certainly not by the government’s claim of a ‘zero carbon electrical system’ by 2035 can any of this make sense.
I’m sure that if you ask almost any of your friends, colleagues or acquaintances if the think that evs and heat pumps are better for the environment they will say yes.
Propaganda!
This for Paul personally. I haven’t mastered photos here, from The Times. 4 Jan
“Energy Bills
Sir. The MPs calling to reduce electricity bills by removing VAT are looking in the wrong place. Instead we should ask why electricity is so much more expensive than the cheapest and cleanest ways of producing it.
Consumers are paying three to four times the cost of generating electricity from new wind and solar. Last year these renewables generated more than a quarter of our electricity, and nuclear energy and imports another quarter, the cost of transmission and balancing the system is only a modest add-on. Yet our electricity market design ensures that gas sets the price for all consumers, which is what has mainly driven the recent price surge.
We need to redesign the system rules to allow direct consumer access to cheaper, low-carbon electricity and to accelerate expansion of wind energy which, onshore, is the cheapest of all.
Michael Grubb
Professor of Energy and Climate Change UCL etc