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

So today is an excellent example of how the system works. Right now we are seeing a lot of solar power, some 11.33GW

But the gas generators know that will drop a lot after 4-5pm, with demand likely going up at the same time. So there is 3.11GW of gas running and a wholesale price of £28.83/MWh

That price is less than half of the wholesale cost of just the gas being burned, so is clearly loss-making for them, but the 3.11GW of gas burning represents a much greater capacity of gas generation just ticking over at less than full output. Waiting.

They will be waiting to hit the evening peak to ramp the turbines up and make £150/MWh or more to fill the gap that 11.33GW of solar is currently filling, and they will more than recover the losses made running a fraction of their capacity at very low prices.

That 11.33GW in turn is less than half of the gas capacity available, so the £28.83 has arisen from a competitive bidding process between the gas generators as to whom will be best placed to supply the evening demand slots

So gas generators are likely setting the price as the marginal suppliers, even though they are losing money for these segments in time when renewables are dominating.

I was considering an EV 12 months ago I could buy it charge it in carparks etc it would have been cheaper but the insurance quotes were 4× what my petrol cost me

I can't afford that

That's a good point. Are EVs about the same to insure generally?

We've never noticed our insurance cost a penny more than any other car.

Depends what car you usually drive tho'

the insurance quotes were 4× what my petrol cost me

Oh dear, I missed that one in my roundup of the fossil fuel myths earlier. We bought an EV 8 years ago, and it cost no more (or less) to insure than the petrol and diesel cars we had before, but it had a similarly powered motor to the ICEV engines (ca. 120hp).

Once you have a similarly powerful car, the primary risk is you as a driver, with your age and driving history, not the vehicle - so this idea of EVs being more expensive to insure in general is nonsense.

EVs can have a lot more power than petrol cars in a similar size vehicle though, so insurers will treat certain groups of drivers driving very powerful cars as being inherently risky - I believe you cannot get insurance at all for a 500hp Tesla if you’re a man under 25, but that is also true of 500hp ICEVs - were you looking to replace a “normal” 120hp petrol car with a secondhand 500hp Tesla or something?

We know seven others who have bought secondhand EVs and have never heard that insurance was an issue for them. They range from BMW i3s through a medium sized Kia, an ID.3, e308, Audi Q4 etc. All fairly ordinary vehicles and all with normal insurance quotes.

There are certainly outliers and specific circumstances why particular insurers might quote a different price for specific models and for specific drivers. It was ever thus - but there have also always been brokers and market comparison services to help you find the deal that works for you, even back in the analogue world before the internet.

So to be quite honest, your comment feels like some of the other late ones popping up as the thread dies, repeating long debunked anti-EV sentiment. If you got one quote 4x what you were expecting, why did you not continue looking, visit a comparison website or ask another EV owner where they insure their car, rather than just giving up?

@crackofdoom

This is a follow up to my earlier post, and it is as I expected. With the solar power gone now, and wind power having dropped a little, ramped up gas turbines are now filling a much bigger proportion of demand.

And as expected, the price has shot up from ca. £29 to ca. £140/MWh, so the gas generators will be minting profits far above their marginal costs now. It would likely have gone even higher if demand had remained as high as it was in the early afternoon

This pattern will be repeated as long as we have insufficient renewables and energy storage to remove gas generation from the grid apart from in exceptional circumstances. And it is the reason why overnight EV charging can be so much cheaper than at peak times.

The idea that there are politicians out there lying that trying to drill for more fossil fuel from the North Sea could change this behaviour of fossil fuel companies, when it is precisely those companies that will be doing the drilling, sickens me. One has to ask in whose interests do those politicians lie so blatantly?

Thank you. I'm not going to say that I entirely understand (I've just come back from a gruelling 10 hour training day, perhaps not the best time!)but let's say I'm inching closer to understanding than I previously was 😆

No wonder the Panorama episode on renewable energy just said "Yeah, gas generation is really expensive" and pretty much left it at that eh 😆

Also, hard agree with that last paragraph.

@crackofdoom

Thank you. I'm not going to say that I entirely understand

It’s not an easy thing to properly comprehend how the wholesale price can be set by (sometimes) the lowest provider, and sometimes the highest - it’s so much driven by the ability of gas generation companies being able to dispatch from 0.25 to 25GW of power at will (within a given time frame), and their ruthlessness in using that ability to make obscene profits (when they can get away with it).

If the regulators tried to change things to constrain their ability to do so too aggressively, they could withdraw their capacity from the market and suddenly we would face blackouts.

And of course, under the previous government their behaviour was rewarded with £billions of taxpayer’s money being pumped into the system (and into shareholder’s pockets) rather than any attempt being made to limit such war profiteering (as it seemed to me at the time). I think it was Martin Lewis that pointed out that it was absurd how high prices were being driven when the actual underlying commodity price of gas hadn’t risen so much in absolute terms.

There are two more useful data points today to help show how wind power keeps the wholesale price down (when the wind is blowing, of course). At exactly the same time as yesterday (13-13:30), we had a similar amount of solar generation, but much less wind power, much lower demand and only a little more gas. And as a result the gas generators could bid supply in at a much healthier (for them) price of £82.50/MWh (8.25p/kWh) rather than yesterday’s loss-making £28.83/MWh.

And because the reduced wind power has continued into the evening, the gas generators have bid the price up higher still than yesterday, to £149.90/MWh (14.99p/kWh)

There is a reason why there is so much noise from the usual suspects trying to slow down the move to renewable energy and storage, and it is their fear that the money pump that fills their pockets and the pockets of their friends is gradually being shut down.

I think these two videos capture a lot of the reasons why we became convinced that EVs are the future, and chose the Polestar 2 because of its superb driving dynamics and particularly its single-pedal driving capability, after trialling it with hired cars on long road trips.

Both are from the Petrol Ped YouTube channel, run by a car enthusiast who is proudly neutral and features ICEVs, hybrids and EVs in equal measure (the clue is in his channel’s name).

This is of him driving on a B road in Wales:

Petrol Ped on the Polestar 2 (jumps to the section on single-pedal driving at 16’40”)

And this is his discussion with the amazing Moggy from Electric Classic Cars as he debunks EV battery myths (a fair few of which we’ve seen come up here):

The Truth about EV Battery Life and Charging Best Practice

Leaving aside that this is rather tacky advertising on your part

1. People don't necessarily have 40k plus to spend on transport
2. Still don't have a drive nor anywhere to charge and there are perhaps three public points in or near my town of 20,000 people.This is not gullible believing myths about EVs it is a stone cold FACT

@Forthesteps

Leaving aside that this is rather tacky advertising on your part

What exactly am I supposed to be advertising? Are you seriously suggesting that I gain something material from posting links to (very old) videos on someone else’s YouTube channel? Or do you think that I am, in fact, Petrol Ped himself?

That is just a bit ridiculous - we’re on page 39 of a thread that I have been on since the early pages, and these are the very first links to that particular channel I have posted - I have posted many others to channels like Just Have a Think and Everything Electric. Do you think I might be Dave Borlace or Robert Llewellyn?

I have posted several times that we have to rely on public charging of our EV, since we don’t have the money to live in a house with off-street parking, and whilst few can afford brand new cars of any kind, there are now plenty of secondhand EVs on the market now, just as secondhand vehicles have always been what the majority of private buyers have bought. All the people we know with EVs bought them secondhand, so your £40,000 doesn’t make any more sense to me than your “advertising” accusation.

I can sympathise with your situation re: chargers though, since we were in the same position only a couple of years ago. There was only one within a ten minute walk of our house, and it could easily be out of order. And there were also very few EVs around our area.

Nothing I have ever posted suggests that a lack of chargers in certain areas is any kind of myth, so I don’t understand your “stone cold fact” comment either - the EV myths I have talked about relate to their batteries, fire risk, weight, insurance costs etc. The variability of charging facilities and dearth in some places is, as you say, a fact,

But things change, precisely because enough people can see that EVs are the future and make sense for them right now. They might not make sense for you at the moment, and that’s fine, because literally no-one is forcing you to change.

I strongly suspect that the chief reason for Trump unleashing this deadly tomfoolery in the Middle East is that the spike in oil prices must be netting the American oil companies billions. The same oil companies that donated so generously to his election campaign. Still blood for oil eh 😡

@crackofdoom

the spike in oil prices must be netting the American oil companies billions

This ^

The man himself, not known for keeping his mouth shut, actually admitted as much:

Donald Trump on Thursday shrugged off the economic toll the war in Iran is taking on gas prices across the United States, writing on social media that “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money”.

‘We make a lot of money’: Trump downplays rise in gas prices during Iran war

He’s framing his remark in the hope that people will think “we” means America as a whole, but he clearly identifies with the actual winners here - the oil companies and Putin - ordinary people everywhere are going to suffer hugely as energy prices rocket.

Two years ago I bought a 4 year old Vauxhall Corsa-e. I bought it from a dealer with a 6 month warranty for £13k. It doesn’t have a huge range compared to current models (180) but it’s great for the daily driving I do round this county (usually around 30-100 miles a day) and I have done longer drives in it. There is no sign of any loss of charging capacity. It’s a great little car. It remains a private car, with all the public negatives involved (congestion, parking space required etc). However, while I have a job that requires daily driving, an EV is certainly my future.

Yes fossil fuels are going to rocket, well over £2.50 per litre, Electricity will go up massively too.
The impact on the wider economy is going to be massive, blowing up gas & oil fields means huge environmental damage and these will take many years to rebuild, if they can at all.

Trump is threatening to destroy Iran's energy industry & Iran will retaliate.

People wont be able to afford any sort of motoring.

You’re a little ray of sunshine aren’t you. Generally it’s better for your health to have a more positive outlook. No one knows what’s going to happen.

We bought a 64 kWh second hand Kia Niro last year. It cost about £14k. It has a range of about 200-240 miles in the real world (depending on temperature etc). Less than the official figure of 280 miles or so, but still very usable.

We intended to use it mostly locally but given the price of diesel for our larger vehicle we've actually used the EV for a lot of trips as a family. Being able to charge the thing up for £4-5 at home is great. On longer trips, public chargers are more expensive but still compare favourably with petrol or diesel and a single half hour stop on a journey of 300 miles is no hardship.

Exactly - we are in the same position. Would have to stop on a 300 mile journey so plug in go for a coffee etc exercise the legs and car has a top up

If this happened the drop in tax revenue would render most services useless so there'd be no NHS or food.

If you're going to catastrophise it....

Anything can happen with Trump, if he and his mates can place bets on it and make massive amounts from disaster capitalism.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cge0grppe3po

@Alexandra2001

Electricity will go up massively too.

So far, EV charging costs haven’t been affected, at least in the UK, and as anyone following this thread will know, we rely 100% on public charging so we would be the first to feel the pain if they had. All the networks we use (Char.gy, Ubitricity, Arnold Clark, Be.EV, Tesla etc.) have held their prices constant.

That’s in contrast to 2022, when electricity shot up in price, and EV charging costs followed suit, so that the highest public charging costs could exceed diesel (and gave the fossil fuel industry and the usual suspects in the media a stick to beat EVs with).

There’s several reasons for this divergence in experience. The main one is that in the 4 years since 2022, the renewable energy contribution in the UK has increased a lot, and we have another 1.4GW Interconnector (to Denmark) live to help balance the system. That means gas hasn’t got quite the stranglehold on prices that it had then, and we’re at the tail end of spring rather than winter, so UK gas demand is dropping fast anyway.

Since 2022, Europe has built more LNG import terminals to take US gas too, so we are not importing LNG through our terminals only to export it to mainland Europe (which was a huge part of what was going on as we decoupled from Russian gas)

Other countries are also demanding less LNG than they did back then too. Pakistan, for example, has built so much solar power that they have actually been cancelling LNG deliveries.

It’s hopeful that many countries will respond as the UK has been doing, and double-down on renewables and batteries as the cheapest option to create energy security, rather than feeding the fossil fuel monster with more taxpayers’ money, and this summer will see record sales in solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and EVs

I’m not giving up yet - follow the facts rather than your fears and you might not need to either.

TBF my earlier post has aged well... we have had Trump saying he will destroy a civilisation, talks that led to nothing much, now talks are stalled, US has attacked and taken over an Iranian tanker.
US is blockading Hormuz.

Trump today saying he will attack all energy plants and bridges.

Diesel at m/w service stations is anywhere between 206p and 218 per litre, around 188p to 200p anywhere else.

No reason why it cannot reach 250p as we do not refine any of our own diesel and even if Hormuz opened fully today, it would be 5/6 weeks before tankers came back into Europe.

There are ready jet fuel shortages across Asia, Australia and now starting to occur in Europe, with supplies, at current usage, at around 6 weeks worth.

I think there is a great deal of complacency around at the moment.

@Ayebrow EV charging prices are neither here neither here nor there for the majority.
Gas prices are global, it doesn't matter if we can get LNG from the USA, if the price, globally goes up due to shortages.

Pakistan is actually running out of everything atm.

I think there is a great deal of complacency around at the moment.

And what do you mean by this @Alexandra2001 , what do you expect people to "do" in the face of these rising numbers?

Work themselves up into hopeless doom, obviously.

I would recommend for sanity to avoid worrying about things you can actually do nothing about. But we’re all different.