Electric cars are NOT the future, are they?

[Isometimeswonder]

I am genuinely torn. I need want a new car but really don't want electric.
But so few smaller petrol cars are made now.
I haven't got a place to charge a car at home.
AIBU I should accept electric is the future.
AINBU I should get petrol. (Please recommend a small city car)

@Imdunfer

We had a little Axam lead acid battery powered car in 2008, then the first available hybrid, then a Renault Kangoo full electric van (with no heating! ) in 2016

Wow, I’m seriously impressed 👏. But then I’ve always been a bit cautious about new technology, rather than being a true early adopter. Funnily enough, my EV sceptic BIL (and slightly less sceptical sister) took their VW ID.3 on a trip to a remote part of Ireland, and ended up having to get a top-up with their granny charger at a hotel to reach their destination. That was when we were still just cautiously hiring Teslas for long range journeys to learn about them, and not straying too far off the main UK routes (and Supercharger network 😬)

I didn’t want to be negative, so I told BIL he was “very brave”, but inside I was muttering, “fool” (with some unprintable additions). I did think as well that if they could do that journey in that car that time, then EVs will work for way more people than they currently think, for certain.

@Imdunfer

We also still, until battery storage catches up, still have a serious risk of dunkelflaut power cuts.

I don’t think there’s much risk of actual power cuts here. The UK grid always has a lot of reserve capacity, but it does cost a lot of money to maintain. The good thing about Dunkelflaute is they are forecastable, so there is plenty of time to ensure generation capacity is in place, along with incentives to consumers to reduce load.

But you’re not wrong about our need for much more storage, if we’re going to keep beating gas out of the grid (together with its baleful impact on wholesale prices). They are expanding our limited pumped hydro, as well as going live with some of the world’s biggest battery storage projects, as well as constructing 4 undersea HVDC links to bring Scotland’s enormous wind energy resources to England’s bigger population centres, rather than paying wind farmers constraint payments when they cannot dispatch all they generate.

The Economist published a fantastic study that showed what could be achieved if all the North Sea countries worked together to make full use of the wind power available in the basin, and watching us building out the HVDC links to more of those same countries in the last few years (we’ve had the ones to France for a very long time) feels like we’re going in that direction much faster than most of the public realise.

There’s also the scope for using domestic car batteries to balance the grid, by allowing customers to sell energy back into the grid from their plugged in but charged cars when the grid needs a boost.
There’s a lot of energy held in charged cars and smart meters/chargers are more than capable of moving that power in both directions.

A few early adopters managed to power their houses off their cars in the aftermath of Storm Goretti down here.

Another thing I love is hills! An EV glides up them no hill starts. We have some mentally steep roads in our small city. When in our old ICE car I used to get worried I would roll backwards and the hill starts were so stressful. None of that with an EV.

@Ayebrow "Filling our Polestar 2 on wind power before a 1,000 mile road trip before Christmas gave me that feeling, and I won’t ever give it up."

Ditto feeling whenever we take our iPace out that has been fueled by our solar panels and then DH telling me from the app that we've sent to the grid despite having run the washing machine, the dishwasher and the tumble dryer and the battery is still at 100%. There is no better feeling knowing that I have not cost the planet for running my appliances and that someone else is using electricity that we have generated, sent to the grid and that has also not cost the planet.

@Ayebrow I find your belief that you're making the World a "Greener" place by taking a 1000mile road trip in a Polestar 2, rather ridiculous

As it was a trip just before Xmas, i'll assume it was an non-essential journey? Train and possibly hire car not possible?

The Geely holding company, for Polestar, has been found to be using slave labour to produce parts and thats before we get to the fossil fuel powered ships that transported your car (along with all its component parts) around the world, the destruction of virgin forest to get that lithium... the oil produced plastics, tire and brake wear.. the damage to roads, fixed with oil based products and machines...

A Polestar 2 costs 43k rrp and many people simply cannot afford solar and batteries

I'm just looking at gas prices and how much more we, the UK are going to need... its going up and up.
As it is almost everywhere else too.

I just find the belief in EVs naive at best... we need to change our lifestyles, not carry-on as before, using slightly "greener" means of propulsion.

@Alexandra2001
I find your belief that you're making the World a "Greener" place by taking a 1000mile road trip in a Polestar 2, rather ridiculous

That is a complete, indeed mendacious, misreading of everything I have posted, where I explain in detail that an individual EV does nothing, but is part of an overall systemic shift away from fossil fuels, that I am happy to be part of. Each battery cell in each EV is a tiny building block towards a future without fossil fuels. My EV adds only a relative handful and trillions will be needed.

As I have made completely clear, I make no claims about how clean my own car is on its own. I have been totally honest in the fact that it is only relatively cleaner than an ICEV, so all the detail of its dirtiness doesn’t change what I have posted.

Taking your arguments at face value, you appear to believe it is only possible to solve global warming if everyone gives up their cars and flights (and everything else), and because you have stated (several times) that you’re convinced that won’t happen we’re essentially doomed.

As @glowfrog pointed out to you, that is the fossil fuel industry’s last ditch position which can be summarised as: “it’s all too late, people won’t change, we have to keep making money burning stuff.”

Demanding that we change “our lifestyles” will not achieve anything when we need to change our entire energy economy - as I have posted before, the fossil fuel industry invented this idea of focussing on individual lifestyles (the carbon footprint) precisely to divert pressure away from themselves, so you are basically doing their work for them - your posts appear to be filled with fossil fuel talking points.

They are already being used to balance the grid by storing wind power created overnight when demand is low, by offering people what seem like insanely low overnight tariffs. It costs 2p per mile to run our car.

There's an elephant in the room though. There is only enough grid to transport power for a given number of cars to be charged in any one area. There a lot of (expensive) work to be done on generating power close to point of use and until then people could be fighting over time slots in their area to charge the car.

@Imdunfer

people could be fighting over time slots in their area to charge the car.

That’s not true. There’s a reason home chargers on a single-phase supply with a 100A main fuse are limited to 7kW - that’s the rating for each of the house ring mains circuits and its supply to any individual load (such as an electric hob + oven.

The system is designed so that a group of houses on a single-phase local distribution connection to a grid transformer can theoretically all pull up to that 100A limit, although in reality most houses will only draw a fraction of it at any one time.

Where the grid is older, houses typically have 60A main fuses, and 20A/5kW limits on EV chargers (or lower). It’s a very conservative system, since in the past there was no chance of any smart charging with time controls.

The biggest grid constraint is actually how much people can feed in with solar power, which is why 4kW arrays have been the norm when feed-in tariffs were encouraging installations.

But you are absolutely right that getting people to soak up overnight electricity is helping to balance the grid - bidirectional charging will help that enormously too. There are already ways for “virtual power plants” to be formed, although those are mostly limited to home battery storage systems rather than EVs, but the principle is exactly the same.

There is not enough capacity in the grid currently to charge all the electric cars if everyone goes electric.

The cross country wires aren't big enough and there aren't enough of them.

I am translating here from the electrical engineer I'm married to.

If everyone in the street buys an electric car, there are many streets in the country where people will have to come to an agreement who charges their car when, because they will not all be able to charge them at once.

Our new Coop 200 metres away had four super fast chargers installed a year ago. They applied to connect them to the grid and were told that they could not be supplied with that amount of power. There are now 3 standard and one super fast.

There are solar arrays queued up waiting for connection because the infrastructure in the area has to be upgraded first.

The cost to upgrade the infrastructure to both generate and transport sufficient power for us all to drive electric is eye watering.

I'm sorry you've read it that way... but its pretty much what you said:

But the only way for us to build a future is as an electric one, and I intend to be a (tiny) part of that. Filling our Polestar 2 on wind power before a 1,000 mile road trip before Christmas gave me that feeling, and I won’t ever give it up

I also don't agree that saying its "too late" to stop eg a 2.5'C increase in global temperatures as a Fossil fuel industry perspective/argument, i thinks its reality, it will probably be more.

Anyone who truly wishes to make a difference/slow the rate of change, needs to stop doing what they doing, vote differently and hope that other countries wake up....

But given who is in power in the worlds most polluting countries, this is a forlorn hope.

@Imdunfer

There is not enough capacity in the grid currently to charge all the electric cars if everyone goes electric.

That is somewhat disingenuous. No-one is suggesting that everyone is going to go electric right now.

The transition to near 100% electric is going to take at least 30 years, even if the current EV mandates are held to, since some older ICEVs (and hybrids) will be on the road until gone 2050 at least.

And there are definite grid connection constraints like in your Coop example - super rapid chargers deliver > 100kW, so enough electricity for several houses, and you can’t just slap a bunch of them in and expect the grid to support them overnight.

There will be a long transition where local distribution networks have to be strengthened and updated here and there, but there is nothing to suggest that won’t happen in an all-electric future.

But as a thought experiment, I’ll show why we’re not that far away as your husband believes. I’m an electrical engineer myself 😀

There are 40m cars in the UK vehicle parc. They currently drive 8,000 miles each per year (on average). If we assume that those are all driven at a pretty poor average of 3.5miles/kWh, that’s 6.26kWh each per day, for a grand total of 250GWh. If we assume that people mostly avoid peak hours from 4pm to 10pm, we have 18 hours when the grid has lower than peak demand, so over those 18 hours we will need an average of 14GW of power to be delivered.

Bear in mind that the UK grid’s maximum generation capacity is something like 60-65GW, but typically sees no more than 40-45GW demand even in winter, we have plenty of available generation capacity to keep 40m EVs on the road even now, even if a proportion of drivers plug-in between 4pm and 10pm. And my assumption is based on 3.5kWh average consumption, when many EVs do far better than that.

Now all of that is based on averages, and assume that there is a broad mix of usage spread quite evenly around, and 40m cars won’t all be plugged in and drawing 7kW at exactly the same time.

We don’t charge our EV every day, but then we charge it pretty intensively over longer trips. Others will just do overnight top-ups to cover a regular commute etc.

“The Grid can’t cope” is one of the most pervasive EV myths, so it’s worth posting this excellent interview between the late Quentin Wilson and Lorna McAtear of National Grid on the Everything Electric channel. It covers many of the myths, but the link jumps straight to the relevant section:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMngBMlX_mY&t=1800s

Others have posted links to the excellent IamKate grid monitoring site, but I’m a big fan of this one, which shows the year round demand and generation data very nicely (for those like me that drove an original Mini for a while):

http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk

@Imdunfer

The cost to upgrade the infrastructure to both generate and transport sufficient power for us all to drive electric is eye watering.

That is true, but one thing that many people don’t realise is that vast parts of our current energy infrastructure is ageing, and eye-watering amounts of capital will be needed anyway over the next 30 years to upgrade and replace it, whatever we do. Many of our gas-fired power stations were built during the “dash for gas” in the 90s, and as almost all of our nuclear power stations shut we will be left with Sizewell B until Hinkley C starts up (eventually).

In truth, what the fossil fuel industry wants is to delay the deployment of renewable energy and EVs long enough so that as much of the existing and ancient infrastructure is replaced with coal, gas and oil burning equipment, since it will gift them several more decades of profit making at the expense of our health and the Earth.

@Imdunfer

I'm sorry - I said, “your husband” when all I know is you’re married to an electrical engineer. I was too late for the edit window.

I have a three phase supply. The solar panel evangelists at work practically wet themselves when they find that out telling me what i need to install, and talking abut selling money back to the grid and battery banks and other such stuff that i pay little attention to but they do rather give the impression, rightly or wrongly, that it's their hobby. I have hobbies, I don't need a new one :-)

@Alexandra2001

this is a forlorn hope

That is a self-fulfilling/circular argument, because essentially you are saying, “the only way we save the world is if everyone changes what they are doing, and because that won’t happen, the Earth cannot be saved.”

I’m not going to live like that myself - as a PP posted, I want to be part of the change I want to see (even if only a tiny part, as I said). After we sold the Nissan Leaf on to a member of our family that could make best use of it, we survived for 8 years without a car, since our petrol Volvo estate died, and the Leaf had taught us that EVs were the future, although not yet for us. We decided to wait for the future to arrive in our lives.

That worked because London has excellent public transport, and we could walk 1 mile to a big Sainsbury’s with a trolley, and have the occasional grocery delivery. We hired EVs for longer journeys (so far, so exactly what you posted in terms of lifestyle change). But our DDs are getting older, and our wider family live far away, and EVs have got better and cheaper, and lamppost chargers began to appear.

So we did the maths and worked out having our own car would work, and like millions of others went ahead and got a car. It has all the environmental issues you highlight, sure, but let me explain one thing you maybe don’t see.

One of the things we experienced at first hand was the gradual arrival in London of BYD electric buses (there are now over 2,000 of them). Back when Boris bullied his awful bus onto the road, it could only be a hybrid, with a crappy battery that is almost never used, and even then it cost double that of a diesel double decker.

BYD started as a battery manufacturer, alongside CATL, but as EV sales have boomed around the world it took on car manufacturing and now sells more EVs than Tesla. As I have explained before, every doubling of installed capacity brings the cost of everything mass-produced down relentlessly, through learning-curves, and Li-ion batteries (whether in a car, home/grid-storage, toothbrush or bus) are the same - they are now 75% cheaper than 10 years ago, which makes building an all-electric double-decker with 400miles range an economic proposition.

And they are amazing. As a passenger you benefit from the same smooth delivery of power and regenerative braking as in an EV, and they are super quiet. TFL benefits from hugely reduced maintenance costs and the impact on air quality is huge (even “clean” diesels are very dirty in comparison)

So another sector that people argued could never be electrified has been, and all because battery costs have relentlessly dropped. The next generation of sodium-ion batteries will bring costs down even further.

And none of that would be possible if Elon Musk hadn’t proved that an EV could be built that wasn’t a novelty vehicle, and could be mass produced. It’s worth posting the pilot episode of Robert Llewellyn’s Fully Charged channel (now Everything Electric) again to show how far things have come in 15 years:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YfTiRNzbSko

and also, for anyone that doubts the economics of building a fossil-fuel free world based around battery (and hydrogen) energy storage (including all the issues around materials etc), this is worth a read, since it has deeply researched and referenced:

www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

@Automagical

I have hobbies, I don't need a new one :-)

You possibly won’t want to watch this, of course, but others reading your post might like to - what can be done when someone with a hobby to remove fossil fuels from their life (year-round in the UK) can do:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PzbCg-tj77g

But hobbyists and small company entrepreneurs will ultimately develop tech that people can just install and use (or buy with their house), without having to get into the details (just like 99% of ICEV drivers have zero idea of how most of the tech under the bonnet actually works).

It’s exactly the same with EVs. The Tesla Roadster was based on the ideas of some engineers wondering whether they could get 6,000 odd toothbrush/laptop batteries to power a car. They only built 3 tZeros, and refused to sell their creation to Musk et al - just licensed some of the tech they had developed. And nowadays most EV drivers also have no clue how their vehicle works.

But there are some delightful people helping to move the tech forward like those guys that built the tZero, like this ex-Rally driver in Wales:

m.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJlT-cgHtk

@Ayebrow
You mis-understand me.

I'm not saying that we cannot have EV busses or cars etc etc, i'm saying that unless we change our way of life, then its all a bit futile, we need reductions in car use, less flying, cleaner shipping and less tat transported around the world, inc food, we don't need AI or not on the scale its being prepared for.

Instead we have more planes, more tourism, more concrete for hotels etc more and more cars, even if EV's, they still pollute.
More industry, more data centres, more water use....

Then there is the potential security issues associated with Chinese EVs and tech...

@Alexandra2001

its all a bit futile, we need reductions in car use…

”reductions” are simply not going to be enough. If you genuinely believe in the climate crisis that is threatening to upend human life on this planet then you must also understand that merely reducing what we do barely scratches the surface of the change that is needed.

We have to stop burning all but a fraction of the fossil fuels we currently burn, while allowing 6 billion people an opportunity to gain some modicum of a quality of life approaching what we are used to - or are you proposing that they continue in relative poverty forever?

I trust not.

I’m going to attempt one last time to explain how important it is that we replace ICEVs with EVs, not because of their individual environmental impact, but their collective impact.

There were ca. 1m EVs on the planet’s roads in 2015, and there are now ca. 64m. That is 6 doublings of installed capacity. Because of learning curves, Li-ion EV batteries have come down in cost by 75% in that time, and some simple maths shows that each doubling has therefore led to roughly a 20% reduction in cost. Without the EVs, there would be no cost reduction.

We are now just below the tipping point where EV batteries cost less than $100/kWh, which is the benchmark at which a BEV costs the same as an equivalent ICEV. So the ICEV is now doomed in the medium term - the rate of take-up in places not so flooded with anti-EV misinformation shows that clearly.

There are ca. 1.5 billion cars on the planet’s roads, so we have 4 more doublings to go, and would expect to see battery costs reach 10% of their 2015 cost, so EVs that will cost much much less than ICEVs. That means that the ICEV’s doom will happen faster than most people can appreciate right now - the maths of exponentials are quite awesome.

The technology for that level of progress is already in place - I have posted links to sodium-ion battery advances which seem to me to be the route we will take (there are others).

And you may throw up your hands and declare that we are doomed! If cars are cheaper, surely we will end up with even more than 1.5 billion! That will be catastrophic perhaps. But I would argue otherwise.

This video is the peerless Dave Borlace on his “Just Have a Think” channel, explaining what China is doing to build 10s of 1,000s of miles of HVDC links from the places where it can generate renewable energy and bring it to the places where it needs that energy. We think we’ve done well building 2 x 750km HVDC links (to Norway and Denmark), but as with most things EV, battery and energy transition related, China takes it to the next level:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9OcsvNZeB0

The Sun’s fusion reactor provides many times our energy needs, and we are only at the start of using it effectively. Once we do so more fully, all manufacturing and indeed all of our life on Earth can be powered more directly by the sun. That is the only end-state goal that works - not merely reducing our fossil fuel burning, but replacing it entirely.

Here is Dave Borlace again, explaining why the fossil fuel industry has been able to fool people with its “primary energy fallacy”, and what is being done to show that renewables are already pulling far more weight than most people realise (it’s a bit technical this one):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qokwulKU9Bg

And finally, this came out only today. Elliot Richards on Everything Electric with the launch of BYD’s mass rollout of 1.5MW “flash-charging”, which spells the end of all the “I won’t get an EV because it would cost me a few minutes of my life” arguments:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrchz4r44_Q

If you want to know what the future looks like, you need to watch what is happening in China. And I don’t buy the “security issues associated with Chinese EVs and tech” thing at all. I’m more worried that our Polestar is built with Google tech than that it is built in China.

I virtually guarantee that you are typing your posts on hardware that is made in China - I certainly am. If the Chinese are somehow spying on my life via tech then they’re doing it already with all the connected devices in our home - the idea that they can somehow do something with a car that is designed in Sweden with American software is a bit fanciful no?

i love my ev. Particularly since we put in solar panels at home as well. Our electricity charges and furl
charges are tiny and will be non existent during the summer months . I think my favourite thing about about them is that they have no engine so only working parts are break pads . I used to live in fear of something like head gasket going in a car costing thousands . I love the cost certainly .

Maybe someday.
Infrastructure - accessible and affordablefor those of us without personal access to a charger - first.
Until then, I'm filling up. Because I literally have no choice. So stop nagging me, eco lobby, and nag the Infrastructure guys.

I hear there's a phase of fuel panic buying...

A phase which is completely unnecessary and mad when you consider the average journey taken in the UK (69% of people!) is less than 20 miles.

People fill up because they think others are doing so.

If fuel prices are due to go up by 5p a litre let's say, and they have a 45 litre tank, is it really worth going out, queuing up, getting upset and then returning home, all to save £2.50?!!

And most people aren't even empty - they're topping up because they think it makes them "prepared"

Utterly ridiculous.

I agree that some people will hear the rumours of fuel shortage and dash to fill up, when they already have 80% of a tank and are only planning to do a few miles around town over the following week.

But some people very much rely on a ready availability of fuel. Obviously, if that's the average journey, some people will travel a far shorter distance (or even go for days without moving their car at all) but others will go much, much further.