I'm being told EV charging will be a lot more difficult in the UK than it i s here in the US.
I looked at the typical daily cycle and they have some 10 to 20 GW between the peak and minimum each day with resonably flat consumption in the trough . That will allow off peak charging of a third of the 30 million vehicles for 50 miles.
But I'm being told there are two problems with that. One is that distribut ion is sized for an average of 2 kW consumption per household in many older areas (which they seem to have a lot of). This clearly makes it hard to c harge EVs overnight at just 3 kW which otherwise would be fine for a typica l user. In this case it would require replacement of a lot of distribution cabling.
The other is that many individual homes are on PME circuits where no separa te ground is provided to the home, only the neutral. This neutral is bonde d to water pipes and any other exposed metal that could be grounded my any means, like an old radiator heating system. This is considered safe since even if the neutral to the home opened there would be no shock hazard since there is no ground to make contact with as the grounds in the house are al l at neutral voltage. This does make it hard to use electricity outside wh ere you could contact a true earth ground and suffer electrocution with any grounded appliance. To mitigate this a ground rod at the house is require d which in many cases is prohibitively expensive to install with an adequat ely conductive path.
So are these two problems being presented realistically?
I'm also being told it will be a huge problem to provide enough charging ca pability for the many potential EV owners who park on the street or in publ ic facilities. I expect it is practical to install curb side and parking l ot outlets with some outlay which is small, in fact tiny compared to the co st of a car. But I kinda have to take them at their word for that one.
Rick C.