Interesting. It’s not exactly difficult to do.
Installing this stuff is a bonanza for electricians. They charge £500 to install a basic charger, but you need him to do it if you want to get the grant.
And if he find something “unacceptable” in your house, it’s even better 
In California this week the state government declared that all new cars sold must be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2035. Then I believe two (2) days later a quasi-emergency for electricity generation capacity was declared in which people are asked to minimize use for a certain period every day, including not charging their Teslas. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s the result of political ideologues making law that isn’t in any way based on care for human welfare, economics or on basic arithmetic for that matter.
I predict that what will happen in the real world is that EV purchases will rise to a certain relatively low level, to the market that wants to and can afford to buy into a weak ideology without great impact to themselves. Further market expansion will then stagnate. Come 2030 or so the state will ‘adjust’ the law to reflect technical reality, and then again in a couple more years, and then maybe a third time, having spent a lot of money screwing around with people’s lives and pocketbooks for no reason except to elevate their own political visibility.
I can agree with @Silvaire regarding the possible future of electric vehicles in the USA, I’m not so sure that the same applies to Europe.
The UK would need between 35 and 40 nuclear power stations, the size of Sizewell B to meet its needs into the 2040’s at the current rise in electricity usage. If nuclear is to become the only energy option. Each needs a sizeable piece of land next to a large water source for cooling.
Also because of the cooling a nuclear power station is also a large electricity user.
Of course some of this might be mitigated by using the warm waters to grow tomatoes or coy carp etc.
Then you have to cost of waste and its treatment which has now been accepted in most Western Countries as being taken into account in the costs per MWh of electricity.
So you have cost of land, cost of waste storage, cost of building, and running costs such as maintenance and the cost of Uranium which is likely to rise with demand. Some third world countries could suddenly become very rich.
Cost of building runs into billions and depending on where and politics, including local politics could take anything from 5 (if you are lucky) to 20 years to build, based on historic events.
On the other side we have renewables which by the very nature of most of them are not entirely reliable and often produce the electricity when we don’t need it rather than when we do.
One UK company is using this to its advantage by having a battery stack the size of a 3 storey house on its side. It plugs into the grid and competes to supply that sudden demand requirement against the likes of gas. With gas prices rising it can provide this service cheaper at the moment and still make a large profit. They use a type of battery more suited for this type of job than those used in cars.
The thing about these renewable and renewable add on technology is that they are affordable for large and even smaller investors and can be built relatively quickly.
At the moment the cost of electricity from a nuclear power station is higher than that from on or offshore wind and from solar panels.
The nuclear option however (and I am pro nuclear) will not solve any of our current problems and will need a large amount of government money. Maybe through some sort of nationalisation. (An anathema to many on this forum). We also don’t know what the future holds.Even by the time many of these nuclear power stations are built the demands in electricity could radically change. For instance for many years the UK could rely on lowish demands in summer and peak demands in winter. Then computers came along and demand for electricity for cooling made less of a demand difference between summer and winter. Nowadays with climate change offices and home in countries like the UK are in need of air conditioning and increased demand in summer. The seasons appear to be different and where once we might have talked about April showers now these showers last 3 months. A sudden downpour over a large town can increase demand by 400MW to supply the energy for water pumping stations.
And then of course there will be increased demand for all these electric vehicles that we are going to be charging. In the past there have often been schemes to encourage electricity useage at night when there has historically been low demand by offering consumers cheaper night rates. But will that still be the case if loads of people start recharging their electric vehicles at home, overnight.
On the electric vehicle scene battery techology and battery life is improving and so is the range of vehicles.
Formula E are improving range in their vehicles not through battery technology but through the way engine braking recharges the batteries.
In the coming years 3rd generation models the motors provide 350Kw to drive the car but during braking around 650kw is provided to.recharge the batteries. We will only really know how this works out at the end of the season.
As an investor in the energy sector I have to say it is very difficult at the moment to predict what might turn out to be a good investment.
The radiation from the nuclear waste will increase mutations, which will be subject to natural selection, and will speed up adaptation to the future climates. A win-win future.
I was really surprised today to see a Toyota Mirai sitting at the dealership right here near Zurich. The Mirai is a fuel cell driven electrical car, which runs purely on hydrogen. I was not aware that this thing is actually out already, much less being sold in Europe. It might be an interesting alternative to fully electric cars. Fuelling points for this kind of car are available, not by the dozens per mile but there are a few near me which would be in a reachable distance.
At the same time, i saw their bZ4X fully electrical SUV. Looks like a quite interesting car, however, range is very low with around 400 km off a full charge and charging times on a wall box at home up to 19 hours with 22 kw and over 50 hours on a normal wall outlet. They do claim a 20 minute fast charge mode on their own superchargers of 150 kw/h. In my area, there are a total of 6 chargers available, all at a McDonalds Restaurant. How many of those will ever be available outside maybe at 2am or so….
It will be interesting however to see how the situation develops over the winter, as it is widely publicized that electricity may become a commodity and there is talk of outages. I am almost sure that before they start shutting down people’s homes, charging stations will be shut down way earlier than that. Fact is, if the European infrastructure is in such a state that not even the “normal” electrical consumption can be guaranteed “just” because Putin pulls the plug on gas (and the Germans panicked themselves out of NPP’s so they depend on gas) then it would be totally stupid to continue to promote cars which depend on that network.
At the outlet today I talked to one of the professionals there. While obviously they want to sell cars, the undertone was clear: they had to bring an electric car, even if they don’t believe into the technology themselves. They do set big hopes into fuel cell cars however and are forerunners to be able to offer an operational fuel cell car. Until then, they set their money on Hybrids. Me, I’ll stay with my 1999 Camry for the forseeable future.
gallois wrote:
On the other side we have renewables which by the very nature of most of them are not entirely reliable and often produce the electricity when we don’t need it rather than when we do.
One UK company is using this to its advantage by having a battery stack the size of a 3 storey house on its side. It plugs into the grid and competes to supply that sudden demand requirement against the likes of gas. With gas prices rising it can provide this service cheaper at the moment and still make a large profit. They use a type of battery more suited for this type of job than those used in cars.
The thing about these renewable and renewable add on technology is that they are affordable for large and even smaller investors and can be built relatively quickly.
With the current electricity prices high like never before everybody and his mum are mounting solar panels on their roof. The market for solar panels and inverters is more or less bought empty. The hardware is so cheap nowadays (even in the now raging market) that it absolutely makes sense if you have the space. About half of the new installations come with a battery that stores the generated electricity when own demand is low. These batteries of course work also without solar panels (this is actually illegal where I live). So what I can see is that in the very near future you can buy a box that plugs into a power outlet and then buys electricity (by charging) whenever it is cheap and sells it back when prices are high. Such a box would probably cost 500€ to 1000€. It will be buy it, plug it in, save/make money. Simple as that, no politics involved, no decades of planning, no nimbies, just capitalism in action.
You would need a large battery pack to ryn a heating system in winter.
Most countries have some sort of energy moving tariff. In the UK it was mainly a contract with large companies such as Aluminium smelters to stop production when requested. This allowed the grid not to contract one of the more expensive power stations on stream to cover that demand. Then of course there were domestic tariffs such as economy 7 or heatwise.
In France we had a system called EJP. On such a contract you agreed to reduce your electricity demand on 22 unspecified days of the year (from October to March??) and between 0600 to 1900. An alarm would sound and a red light appeared on the fuse board.
People with electric heating and water heating would usually have an interrupter installed which automatically cut off those high demand appliances.
By signing up to this contract your normal usage rate would be around 3 cents per kw/h but any electricity you used on the 22 EJP days would cost you 46cents per kw/h.
For some it worked out much cheaper for others especially those reliant on electric heating it was a bit of a bind as the heat within the house had often dissipated, especially if there were 2 or 3 EJP days in a row. Then you needed to use 3 times your normal daily demand for 2 or 3 days to get the house back up to temperature. Also you might have to use other methods of heating to keep warm during those days when you didn’t use expensive electricity and of course that other way would need to be cheaper than 46 cents a unit. The system sort of fell by the wayside because the base rate of 3cts gradually crept up and no longer made economical sense.
Your suggestion of batteries would in theory work, however you need a lot of batteries to provide around 150 to 200 Kw/h of electricity. And to recharge that same amount in 11hrs.
There are losses at the inverter. In winter there are also losses at the battery. This is becoming a bit of a problem with electric vehicles as people are beginning to find out that in winter even without driving the vehicle they are using some fuel. So they are paying when they are not using the vehicle.🙃
Batteries are completely infeasible for large loads like cooking or heating. OK for lights, etc.
I don’t think batteries are unfeasible. As I already mentioned a UK company is already storing energy in batteries and selling it into the grid.
It doesn’t matter whether the electricity is used to power 100 light bulbs or a 1 bar electric heater.
If you have let’s say a 10MW battery pack or to put it a different way can hold 10, 000 units of electricity. And let’s say the cost of wind or solar power which I believe is the cheapest to be sold into the market at the moment is 5p per unit. So you buy 10,000 units of that for £500. The grid people have to work out how much electricity they expect to be needed at each part of the day ahead. They then go down a list of suppliers asking how whether they can supply electricity at a given time and at what price. They keep going down the list until they have enough power contracted to meet demand.That price is what the UK market pays.
So here you are with £500 worth of electricity ready to be used. You could put in a bid to the market for your 10,000 units at lets say 10p per unit knowing that at the moment the gas stations might be charging 40p per unit and that is what you are likely to get ie £4000.
You could also decide not to compete on the market and hold on in case the buyers have got it wrong and then like a pumped water storage station you become a very valuable reserve used over a short period and may well be able to charge £8000 for your 10,000 units. Not a bad return on your investment in energy.
Of course its not quite so simple as there are things like buying and storing batteries, a bit of maintenance, administration and losses. But you get the point, I hope. And of course the UK has a different market place to many other countries.
It does have also the problem that consumers always pay the highest price for a reliable electricity supply and don’t really get the benefit of th cheaper electricity that renewables can often supply. One wonders in this case whether the green energy levy is really necessary in times of high demand.
Has anyone worked out the depreciation of a 10MWh battery pack?
Difficult, since (as I wrote further back) nobody is quite sure how long the batteries actually last, so you can’t get GFV finance on cars past 6 years. This business is running on the concept of “never never”. The hype carries on, salesmen get their commissions, Musk gets the media coverage, and the world goes around.
You need a massive battery for powering “heating” type loads in a house. Even heating/aircon in a car (a travelling battery pack, with the batts costing perhaps 5k) is a significant load, and here you are talking of 10x to 100x more energy.
If batteries are ever used for grid storage, it will be in concentrated facilities where you get the economy of scale. And proper fire suppression facilities 
