keitha
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Post by keitha on Jun 11, 2021 13:25:24 GMT
How efficient would using EVs as distributed storage be? Batteries are DC, mains is AC - 'perfect' one-way conversion (which this wont be) is about 95% efficient; plus the inefficiencies associated with going in and out of the car I would predict you're looking at something quite ropey. So the FIT would need to be pretty good to get EV owners on board with that, even before cost & wear of hardware and with some cars the initial input is used to condition the battery. I saw a post recently by someone who was using the cheapest rates to charge his EV during the winter and discovered 1/2 of the charge was used to warm the battery. He was charging lets say 1-1:30 then 2:30 to 3 and 3:30 to 4. so the batteries cooled down between each charging period
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Post by bracknellboy on Jun 11, 2021 17:38:22 GMT
I read the authors initial piece on EVs a week or so ago. Sadly I personally found it to be a pretty poor piece of journalism. Considering in this case the reader was in the receptive rather than sceptic camp that was a bit of an own goal. It is true that this article ostensibly starts to discuss some of the hurdles that the author so blithely and lazily chose to either dismiss in one sentence paragraphs or simply ignore in the first article. But I wasn't particularly impressed with some of his opening on this article either so skipped over the rest of it. ... a more recent BBC article www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57416829... that was the prior article I was referring to, which I assumed, but have not checked, was the same author (I recall the author of todays' piece referring to that article as 'their earlier ....' so think I was right). While there were perfectly valid points in that article, and while the general gist of 'this will happen quicker than you think' was reasonable, I was turned off by the complete failure to address a couple of the major elephants in the room, or their trivialisation. Namely: 1. Sweeping under the carpet the significant challenges of establishing a charging network at scale and pace by flippant comparison to the growth of the network of petrol stations to meet demand of petrol driven cars. In my view a ridiculous comparison since they were able to grow organically alongside growth in total car ownership. As opposed to having existing large scale ownership which you want to switch at speed to an alternative system. [And one which by necessity is likely to require a greater level of 'state' involvement due to need for 'on street' charging in some form]. 2. As I recall, a complete absence of mention the other side of the same coin: namely the ability of electricity power generation and distribution network to cope with the overall demand increase that this all necessitates. In the context of opposite pressures resulting from impending switch off of significant switch off of some current sources of generation. This in itself is a significant problem that needs to be overcome. I don't believe this side of the equation even got a mention. There was a some similarly vacuous comment on something in today's piece that made me 'flip over' the page.
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Jun 11, 2021 17:47:05 GMT
1. Sweeping under the carpet the significant challenges of establishing a charging network at scale and pace by flippant comparison to the growth of the network of petrol stations to meet demand of petrol driven cars. In my view a ridiculous comparison since they were able to grow organically alongside growth in total car ownership. As opposed to having existing large scale ownership which you want to switch at speed to an alternative system. [And one which by necessity is likely to require a greater level of 'state' involvement due to need for 'on street' charging in some form]. When petrol cars started to come in, petrol was sold in sealed branded cans by blacksmiths, chemists, and bicycle repair shops. And was in very, very low demand. Electric cars can, for those who live in houses with off-street parking, be charged at home. Those who do not have off-street parking are quite likely to be slower to convert to electric cars, simply because they tend not to be those best able to afford higher-priced brand-new cars, or who live in city centres and do not have any car at all... The figures are all over the place, but various estimates say about 25% of UK households do not have off-street parking. Probably because the National Grid have said repeatedly, over the last few years, it's not an issue.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 12, 2021 11:24:00 GMT
Since I'm heavily invested in the move to green (which has made me a lot of money so far) as a realistic option within my lifetime I try to see both sides
My concerns would be 1) local area substations not being able to carry the load at certain times of the day especially in high resi areas 2) The battery recycle limit 3) overall energy storage is just too complicated for people
4) the possible move to mini-nuclear forgeting that nuclear always has a hidden bill at the end of life 5) The Daily Mail tries to understand it all
6) some idiot decides, we will run out of copper, lithium, steel to do all this, so let's not try
My expectations/hopes are that 1) battery cycles limitation will be removed or at least taken the state where the car and battery runs out of life more or less together even if used as local storage 2) localised grids will become more the norm rather than the big national grids dues to the development of improved localised controls 3) improvements in the Gibbs Free energy equations/mechanisms for Hydrogen at electrolyser and fuel cell barriers to make H2 a more significant part of the overall fuel mix 4) development of self driving cars to move us all on from the concept of public or private car ownership
The reality is we cannot afford to stay with the old thinking on this subject. We need to invest in stuff to fund our need for "growth" so it might as well be in things that reduce the cost of living rather than things that increase the cost of living. Hence, green investment is the only logical way forward.
Just a point, no one ever asks how efficient fossil fuels are, they always ask how efficient green technology is. This is not because ff's are very efficient in fact they are pretty hopeless but it is just another bat to hit the new technology. If ff could achieve 50% from oil well to tarmac it would be amazing and they just arn't.
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Post by Ton ⓉⓞⓃ on Jun 13, 2021 10:37:26 GMT
How efficient would using EVs as distributed storage be? Batteries are DC, mains is AC - 'perfect' one-way conversion (which this wont be) is about 95% efficient; plus the inefficiencies associated with going in and out of the car I would predict you're looking at something quite ropey. So the FIT would need to be pretty good to get EV owners on board with that, even before cost & wear of hardware
For a simpler contract between suppler and customer, I think over time they won't mention FIT just offer a discount of 10, 20%* for the right to suck power back out of the battery, within limits, when they need to.
* Or what ever %age they think the customer will cave in at.
Separately on battery tech, I found this article in Forbes interesting. Alway amazed at how it's the Ozzies who seem to lead in this field; being such a coal based/mining society.
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Post by crabbyoldgit on Jun 13, 2021 14:56:34 GMT
oh yes the nation grid may be up to car charging , but the local distrubution network . When I worked for BT we ran project trident this where the district network operator payed us a big wedge of money up front so with a few hrs notice we would take the exchanges off mains supply onto back up generators, normaly around 5 to 7 ish in the evening this was so local people could cook their dinners in the electric oven. Also started to see little cabin based generator sets in fields that were used to support local peak load. The just in time, bare back all slack in the system to the bone will one day cost a lot of lives, i remember winter 1963 .Most people had open fires now when the mains goes off and the gas central heating dies a lot of people are going to get very cold very quickly.Soon all communications will be customer mains powered so no one is going to shout for help.
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Jun 13, 2021 15:14:25 GMT
oh yes the nation grid may be up to car charging , but the local distrubution network . When I worked for BT we ran project trident this where the district network operator payed us a big wedge of money up front so with a few hrs notice we would take the exchanges off mains supply onto back up generators, normaly around 5 to 7 ish in the evening this was so local people could cook their dinners in the electric oven. Also started to see little cabin based generator sets in fields that were used to support local peak load. The just in time, bare back all slack in the system to the bone will one day cost a lot of lives, i remember winter 1963 .Most people had open fires now when the mains goes off and the gas central heating dies a lot of people are going to get very cold very quickly.Soon all communications will be customer mains powered so no one is going to shout for help. We're in the boonies, with no mobile signal... We do have FTTP internet, and I've just been looking at changing supplier. Several offer voice-over-fibre landlines... I'm not comfortable with that - I'd rather keep the copper. Unlike many of our neighbours, we keep a corded wall-o-phone as a backup to our usual DECT handsets, too. The transformer for our little enclave of 8 houses and one farm lives up a pole behind my garage. When we were building the garage, Western Power took the opportunity to replace the old transformer, which was the one that'd gone in when AC electrickery came to the area in the 60s. They replaced it like-for-like. 300A rating, fused to 200A. All three phases come to the transformer, 11kV, but only two are tapped, so we cannot have three-phase supplied here. When I asked why, I was told that they didn't want to overstress the upstream distribution by upgrading anything...
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Post by crabbyoldgit on Jun 13, 2021 15:37:16 GMT
enjoy your centraly powered copper phone while you can BT has announced the closure of all traditional exchanges in about 3 years and with that all non customer powered comms ends. As you are aware the local fttc cab has no power backup at all as does 80 to 90 % of all mobile masts, those that do have battery backup are for around a maximum of 2 hrs if the batteries are new ish and work and work is believe me an interesting question.Very few sites have generator sets and even if they do the data links back to the central hubs may not.
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Jun 13, 2021 15:38:41 GMT
As you are aware the local fttc cab... We don't have a cab. We have FTTP, not FTTC.
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keitha
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Post by keitha on Jun 13, 2021 16:35:53 GMT
Since I'm heavily invested in the move to green (which has made me a lot of money so far) as a realistic option within my lifetime I try to see both sides
My concerns would be 1) local area substations not being able to carry the load at certain times of the day especially in high resi areas 2) The battery recycle limit 3) overall energy storage is just too complicated for people
4) the possible move to mini-nuclear forgeting that nuclear always has a hidden bill at the end of life 5) The Daily Mail tries to understand it all
6) some idiot decides, we will run out of copper, lithium, steel to do all this, so let's not try
My expectations/hopes are that 1) battery cycles limitation will be removed or at least taken the state where the car and battery runs out of life more or less together even if used as local storage 2) localised grids will become more the norm rather than the big national grids dues to the development of improved localised controls 3) improvements in the Gibbs Free energy equations/mechanisms for Hydrogen at electrolyser and fuel cell barriers to make H2 a more significant part of the overall fuel mix 4) development of self driving cars to move us all on from the concept of public or private car ownership
The reality is we cannot afford to stay with the old thinking on this subject. We need to invest in stuff to fund our need for "growth" so it might as well be in things that reduce the cost of living rather than things that increase the cost of living. Hence, green investment is the only logical way forward.
Just a point, no one ever asks how efficient fossil fuels are, they always ask how efficient green technology is. This is not because ff's are very efficient in fact they are pretty hopeless but it is just another bat to hit the new technology. If ff could achieve 50% from oil well to tarmac it would be amazing and they just arn't.
you forgot that the local Cables may not be up to the household usage for the area plus another 7 Amps. what runs down my street between houses is at most 3/4 inch diameter
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ceejay
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Post by ceejay on Jun 13, 2021 22:10:00 GMT
you forgot that the local Cables may not be up to the household usage for the area plus another 7 Amps. what runs down my street between houses is at most 3/4 inch diameter Assuming you mean 7kW, the typical load of a car charger (and not 7 Amps which is almost trivial) ... the supply to your house and your street will in practically every case be fine. Most houses have a 23kW supply, some have "only" 16kW. The vast majority of the time you will be pulling a LOT less than that: I was looking at my Smart Meter reports recently and I very rarely exceed 3kWh in an hour, even though I have a lot of electric stuff in my house. The car charger I have fitted to my house, like many others, has a current sensing clamp fitted to the house supply wire, which means that the charger itself can work out whether there is headroom for it to run at full blast and, if not, to throttle back. Not that that will ever be necessary, as I don't expect to be charging the car while having the oven on, running the kettle, toasting bread and running a couple of space heaters all at the same time.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 14, 2021 7:20:15 GMT
The winter of 63 is very unlikely to come back due to climate change.
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keitha
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Post by keitha on Jun 14, 2021 9:36:44 GMT
you forgot that the local Cables may not be up to the household usage for the area plus another 7 Amps. what runs down my street between houses is at most 3/4 inch diameter Assuming you mean 7kW, the typical load of a car charger (and not 7 Amps which is almost trivial) ... the supply to your house and your street will in practically every case be fine. Most houses have a 23kW supply, some have "only" 16kW. The vast majority of the time you will be pulling a LOT less than that: I was looking at my Smart Meter reports recently and I very rarely exceed 3kWh in an hour, even though I have a lot of electric stuff in my house. The car charger I have fitted to my house, like many others, has a current sensing clamp fitted to the house supply wire, which means that the charger itself can work out whether there is headroom for it to run at full blast and, if not, to throttle back. Not that that will ever be necessary, as I don't expect to be charging the car while having the oven on, running the kettle, toasting bread and running a couple of space heaters all at the same time. I think you misunderstand what I was trying to explain this cable supplies over 100 properties. The electrician who wired my solar panels into the system told me that the existing cabling down the street is sufficient for current demand , but as he put it "add 4 or 5 car chargers and it will overheat" Basically in parts of the country if we are to move to EV and Heat pumps then we need to massively upgrade the transmission infrastructure, and perhaps to minimise transmission losses need more local generation. One of my fears in the long term is that if we give electricity a monopoly then there is no control on prices, particularly as I see "time of use" tariffs becoming more the norm. Given what happened in Texas when prices jumped from an average of 12 cents per KWH to $9 ( 8.5p jumping to £6.40 ) So looking at my figures for January and allowing a 3/1 ration of input to output on a heat pump as opposed to gas I'd use about 35KW a day so that would be £200 for one day !
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Post by stevepn on Jun 14, 2021 10:38:23 GMT
Assuming you mean 7kW, the typical load of a car charger (and not 7 Amps which is almost trivial) ... the supply to your house and your street will in practically every case be fine. Most houses have a 23kW supply, some have "only" 16kW. The vast majority of the time you will be pulling a LOT less than that: I was looking at my Smart Meter reports recently and I very rarely exceed 3kWh in an hour, even though I have a lot of electric stuff in my house. The car charger I have fitted to my house, like many others, has a current sensing clamp fitted to the house supply wire, which means that the charger itself can work out whether there is headroom for it to run at full blast and, if not, to throttle back. Not that that will ever be necessary, as I don't expect to be charging the car while having the oven on, running the kettle, toasting bread and running a couple of space heaters all at the same time. I think you misunderstand what I was trying to explain this cable supplies over 100 properties. The electrician who wired my solar panels into the system told me that the existing cabling down the street is sufficient for current demand , but as he put it "add 4 or 5 car chargers and it will overheat" Basically in parts of the country if we are to move to EV and Heat pumps then we need to massively upgrade the transmission infrastructure, and perhaps to minimise transmission losses need more local generation. One of my fears in the long term is that if we give electricity a monopoly then there is no control on prices, particularly as I see "time of use" tariffs becoming more the norm. Given what happened in Texas when prices jumped from an average of 12 cents per KWH to $9 ( 8.5p jumping to £6.40 ) So looking at my figures for January and allowing a 3/1 ration of input to output on a heat pump as opposed to gas I'd use about 35KW a day so that would be £200 for one day ! After reading that I think we are better off with petrol/diesel cars and log burners for home heating.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 14, 2021 11:41:41 GMT
1) We already have localised generation, and we will have more. My house turns out 4kW 2) Moving to the intelligent grid was always on the cards 3) Some areas will need upgraded copper and all the switching that entails
Change was always going to come, why all the fear of change, are we rabbits?
Face up to it, we went the wrong way and we built an expanding industrial complex based on first coal and then oil. It has taken us a long way and was a hell of a lot better than that based on slavery. But it was the wrong route forward and now we are having to change to a route forward that does not condemn our decendants to a pitiful life but might offer them a longer future.
Come on guys, get with the programme, it is exciting and being moaning minnies about it is helping no one.
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