Yes.
No new petrol or diesel cars by 2040
- Thread starter John D v2.0
- Start date
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You could also be charged more for cooking dinner at dinner time.
When you have a smart meter (I am sure that they will become compulsory), you will be charged more for the electricity used to charge your car.
Smart meters will make it easy to distinguish which kWh went into your car, and which went into your NSH or delayed-run washing machines etc., and it will be an offence to fiddle with your wiring to circumvent it just as it is an offence to put red diesel into your car's tank.
It will have nothing to do with how "marginal" the supply is. Last year the govt raised £27.6 billion from fuel duties (https://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn09.pdf). Anybody who thinks that they are going to kiss that goodbye and that they will always pay the same to refill their car with electricity as they do now is an idiot who will end up feeling very aggrieved.
D
Deleted member 18243
Surely battery swapping is the way to go, rather than upgrading the entire distribution network's cables and transformers?
(Excuse me if it's been mentioned already somewhere in the preceding nine pages).
Battery stations all over the country, unmanned, with a ready supply of batteries that have been slowly charged on the normal mains supply. The battery size and connection becomes standardised and the car simply drives in, swipes a payment card; crane lifts out the old and lowers in the new battery.
I can see the future - battery stations on every street; rusty battery blocks piled high; abandoned ones dumped in canals and ditches, blighting the outlook everywhere for the convenience of the car driver.
(Excuse me if it's been mentioned already somewhere in the preceding nine pages).
Battery stations all over the country, unmanned, with a ready supply of batteries that have been slowly charged on the normal mains supply. The battery size and connection becomes standardised and the car simply drives in, swipes a payment card; crane lifts out the old and lowers in the new battery.
I can see the future - battery stations on every street; rusty battery blocks piled high; abandoned ones dumped in canals and ditches, blighting the outlook everywhere for the convenience of the car driver.
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D
Deleted member 18243
I thought I'd pick up on this point as it's a bugbear of mine. From the evidence of my own experience, there has been no reduction in crime ever in this country in my lifetime, leaded petrol or otherwise; only a steady increase.
The statistics used to back these claims show decreases in reported crimes. Many people no longer bother to report "low-level" crime any more, in the knowledge that the police will do nothing about it - or that it is difficult to get through to the police - or that you have to wait hours until a police officer attends - or (as is more recently the case) that there are no longer enough police around to deal with every crime.
How very true. I might add that the courts so often issue derisory sentences which deter no-one, so crime is in effect encouraged. I shouldn't be surprised if the police are as fed up as anyone when their hard word appears to be for nothing.
Yes, that is the whole point of smart meters being installed.
The price you pay will depend on when you use it and what you use it for.
Once smart appliances are the normal thing, other features will include:
- choosing between heating your home or charging your car (not both). Perhaps presented as 'work from home or office'.
- your car not charging at all if there is a shortage of supply
- variable taxes being applied depending on what you are using electricity for
- tumble dryers not working on days it isn't raining to encourage people to hang washing outside
- washing machines not working on rainy days for the same reason
- electric showers only working for a certain number of minutes per day, and a certain number of uses per day based on the occupancy of the property.
Electricity used by 'normal' appliances will of course be charged at the highest rate possible all of the time.
Welcome to the future.
So if your battery is half discharged and you want to top up for a long journey you still pay for a full charge?
Doesn't matter where they are charged, or how fast, you still have to put back in all those GWh used by the cars.
Overall you cannot charge them more slowly than they are discharged, or you'll run out, and to cater for peaks in certain places at certain times you'll need enormous stocks.
That will kill innovation in car design, and, more importantly, battery design.
These ideas might be workable with a small number of EVs on the roads, but then they would not be economically viable.
They will not work for 25M+. An EV future means completely changing how many cars we have, how they are used and how they are owned. A 1:1 swap won't work.
I can confidently predict that one day that will also mean "Definitely not having electricity".
No, for many reasons, some already expressed.
Firstly, it doesn't change the amount of lecky needed - only changes the dynamics of where and how fast it is "sucked". if anything, it could be worse than home charging - home charging allows many hours per battery, a battery swap station would need to recharge them very fast OR charge many batteries at the same time if it is to have a decent turnover of battery swaps. That means a massive supply* - though only to one point vs a generally bigger supply to all points.
Then, as pointed out, it only works if every vehicle uses the same battery pack - or one of a small number of pack designs. That's going to go down well with vehicle designers when you constrain the battery pack that can be used (all cars with the same floorpan !) It also means that the battery packs have to be underneath the vehicle, otherwise it's going to be impractical to have a robotic system to swap them. All the demos/animations I've seen videos of were for packs lowered from underneath by a robotic platform that (once you parked over it) positions itself, unbolts the battery, and installs a fresh one. That further constrains vehicle design. Overall, it means the vehicle manufacturer can't design a battery pack to suit the requirements of the vehicle envelope.
As an aside, this is a problem with aftermarket LPG conversions. For practical reasons (they are pressure vessels), LPG tanks are either cylindrical or toroidal in shape which makes them tricky to fit into/under many vehicles - hence why so many are fitted in the spare wheel well which is often the only space available. The petrol/diesel tank is often a complex shape designed to fit into a complex space formed by various important bits (like suspension/drivetrain components).
Then comes the ownership implications. If you are swapping batteries, then you can either only use your local provider and own your own batteries (the one in use, plus a spare being charged), or you have to rent. That immediately rules out any practical proposition of buying a battery outright - and thus ties you into long term rental options which are seldom cheaper than ownership unless you are one of those "new car every year" types.
Worse, it means having only one rental company, or perhaps two at the most. You can buy your petrol or diesel from any forecourt - whether it's Shell, BP, Texaco, Asda, ... Imagine if you are running low, rent a "Brand A" battery but "Brand A" doesn't have any swap stations nearby ? "Brand A" isn't going to let "Brand B" take one of their batteries off your car, and "Brand B" is going to want you to sign a new leasing agreement before they'll let you have one of yours.
There's a parallel with gas cylinder supplies - eg if you have a Calor Gas cylinder, you can only swap it at a Calor gas agent. The difference here is that gas cylinders are small and light (and relatively cheap), so it's not really a big problem to take on a cylinder from another vendor if stuck.
And yes, if you drive in with half a charge still in the battery, you'll almost certainly find yourself paying for a full charge. That's how it works with Calor gas (and others). There is a possibility that with in-battery management, there might be an allowance for what the management system says is still in the battery - and of course, I'm sure no-one would think of trying to hack that
And then think about what happens when someone comes up with a new battery technology. Does that mean having to double up on the infrastructure again - an extra stack of the new battery type at each swap station ? Or does it mean integrating enough of the intelligence (battery management) and power electronics into each battery pack so that different types can all use a standard charging device and work in any car ? Though, if you think about it, that would be a cool feature in some ways - allowing upgrading of the entire fleet of EVs just by retiring the old batteries and replacing them with the new ones over time.
If people are wedded to battery power, then there are some interesting options. Most people only ever think of the battery as something which both stores and "processes" the energy. There are some types, or variants of common types, where there's an energy transfer cell with separate storage of the reagents. So the power capacity (rate of energy delivery) and energy storage capacity (amount of energy that can be stored) are largely independent - useful for VERY large storage requirements. Such a system could allow recharging by draining off the discharged chemicals (typically two of them), and pouring in freshly charged ones (again typically two). But that would need four tanks, a four way connection, and of course, would lead to considerations of what happens if a car pulls in with contaminated tanks ? I suspect that something like that will never take off for mobile use.
My feeling is that some sort of fuel cell combined with batteries (and/or supercaps) is likely to come along sooner or later - if they can sort out working cells with practical fuels. The fuel cell needn't supply the peak demand as the batteries can do that - it only needs to supply a bit more than the average over a long run, recharging the batteries when load is below the output limit of the cell. That brings us back to a high energy density fuel (eg methanol) which can be dispensed very quickly into an on-board tank
* I vaguely recall doing a "back of an envelope" rough estimate of the electricity needed to replace an average sized petrol forecourt. Based on number of pumps etc, the "energy transfer rate" pumping that high density energy store, and vehicles/hour etc. IIRC the result was in the magawatt range
OOI, do all EVs use regenerative braking to top up the batteries?
See the calculations earlier in the thread. In terms of how fast it transfers energy, each dispenser is in the MW range.I vaguely recall doing a "back of an envelope" rough estimate of the electricity needed to replace an average sized petrol forecourt. Based on number of pumps etc, the "energy transfer rate" pumping that high density energy store, and vehicles/hour etc. IIRC the result was in the magawatt range
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