EV Charging in the UK

They can easily run a 3kW kettle and a 3kW electric fire without breaking a sweat. Even the smallest houses are mains fused for 60A.

The problem is when everyone uses their kettle at once as happens during major sports finals - hte grid has to be prepared to handle that but it is a problem for the supply genertaion not the distribution network.

That makes no sense at all. My brother in law has a house built just post war that has never been rewired and still has round pin plugs. It was on a 60A fused supply and can still do that (and a a bit more).

A typical modern house is fused for 80A or 100A depending on its size.

Aluminium is used in modern mains cables too. The oldest copper ones in my village (which unusually for the UK are overhead on poles) were replaced by three phase aluminium steel cored cable.

I don't off hand know what the national grid maximum load capacity would be but it is certainly a lot more than 2kW per household since some homes rely on all electric heating and also have a kettle which would represent a peak load of 6kW for starters. Hardly any have aircon though

- the climate is never really warm enough for that to be needed.

The average load presented by a home over 24 hours is reckoned to be around 6-8kWhr or 250-300W continuous load. My own house 24/7 base load at night is less than 50W.

The distribution grid can cope. There is nothing like enough generating capacity to cope with a very cold still cloudy winters day though.

My annual mileage is now down to 20k (it used to be 30k). I get 64mpg lifetime average across the range of driving I have to do. I am looking into the viability of an electric car when I replace my diesel.

It will take longer than that before there is any additional electricity generating capacity. There is also a problem that most of the consumers are in the south and south east where as the main generation plant is mostly in the north and north west. Transmission losses are higher than they would be if things were more equitably distributed.

What will allow charging during the day is increased electric production fr om renewable sources. Solar is getting cheap enough that it is profitable to install it on a mass scale... although may not so much in the UK which i s more northern than anyplace in our lower 48. But it won't be long before that is true in the UK as well. Please don't go off about cloudy days and such since EVs don't need charging every day for most people and solar sti ll produces reduced amounts of energy even on cloudy days. So some chargin g will be supportable in the day time with out impact. Just give it a few more years. From what I'm hearing EVs aren't very popular in the UK for no w anyway.

And that is a good thing. The UK has gotten themselves in a bind by not ex panding their capacity enough. So they will certainly be doing something a bout that. In the mean time night time charging won't come anywhere near c apacity for likely some 10 years or more. If the UK can't figure it out by then, well... there's no hope for them.

What does that mean, "they have to prepare for it"? What can you do to bee f up distribution capability? The problem isn't generation or transmission typically. It's the local residential distribution.

Actually, this may not be an issue in the UK at all. In many parts of the US we use heat pumps. The distribution can handle 10-15-20 kW furnaces kic king on all night when the weather gets too cold for the heat pump to work. My concern has been that a 7 kW *continuous* load will be added in a sign ificant portion of homes without coordination of timing.

My understanding is that the UK doesn't use heat pumps with electric back u p. The total demand is lowest at night, but what about residential demand, does that go up significantly on winter nights?

"Continental" is not the issue.

I'm told a good earth is hard to get in many places. But the most recent e xchange seems to show that adding an RCD and a separate earth even if not l ow resistance does the job. One poster said he had this done in his place including swapping out the panel (what we call the circuit breaker box) for one with RCDs.

I don't think it is that simple. In PME systems the power company provides a PEN conductor, combined neutral and earth. In the house this is bonded to all metal conductors like pipes and a safety ground is provided separate ly. If the PEN opens between the house and the transformer where the earth rod connects it to ground, the safety earth wire becomes hot! Since every thing in the house is at that same potential, there is no path for a shock hazard.

Bzzzz! Sorry, you lose. But please play again. You should have been list ening rather than playing those old 78 rpm records in your head. Excess, i dle capacity at night can very adequately charge enough EVs to be a third o f your entire fleet of vehicles. That won't be fully utilized for some yea rs to come.

Yes, for this to work outlets will be needed at the curb. Not an insurmoun table obstacle. But gauging from the seemingly unremitting resistance I en countered in the UK group I was discussing this with, there won't be much p rogress any time soon on this matter.

Although, I see about half these cars are in driveways. Install an outside outlet or two on each of these homes and you are halfway there to charging at home!

BTW, why is that one house blotted out? Any idea?

That is more than twice the safe recommended daily journey length. I have known travelling salesmen fall asleep on the way home doing those sorts of distances.

The chargers I looked at on motorway services claimed to boost the battery back to 80% range capacity in 20-40 minutes.

I think it is an average vs peak issue here. Peak household load can go as high as its main fuse permits 40,60 or 80A. The nominal average daily load that a household presents is usually estimated at 6-10kWhr.

Lower numbers being favoured by green campaigners as it makes how many houses a wind farm can supply sound bigger.

Yes. Though cheap and nasty sockets or corroded ones may run very warm. The fuse in a mains plug gets quite warm at 13A continuous load too.

Although increasingly there has been a push to make portable equipment draw a maximum of 10A = 2.4kW.

Even so I would prefer to use a 32A dedicated circuit in the garage for charging the car. It is not unlike a welding set in terms of load.

Fortunately, the douchebag level of electric car ownership in the UK is still very low. Just a handful of virtue-signallers who only use them for public appearance and keep *at least* one real car at home for when they really need to go anywhere.

Sounds reasonable. The daily commuting distances in Europe is shorter than in the US.

That 2 kW/household sounds right for selecting a distribution transformer. A 200 kVA distribution transformer could serve 100 households.

Even older houses had 35 A ring mains fuses and the distribution cabling must at least be able to feed that amount (8 kW) to each house. After all, fuses protect the _feeding_ network.

Equipotential bonding puts all bare metallic parts to the same potential. Note that when metallic tubes are used to feed water and gas into the house, so if the bare tubes are used, these function as earthing electrodes. Anyway with multiple houses connecting to the same service (water/gas) the equipotential bondings of multiple houses are tied together and to their separate neutral connection. So even if the neutral connection to one house is lost, the current will flow through other connections, limiting the potential rise to a safe level.

Loss of neutral is a large risk with open wire lines, not so much with ABC (Air Bundled Cable) or ground cables.

If the ground is dry and sandy the earth electrode grounding resistance would be high, causing some ground potential rise, but most likely the earth under the EV would also be high resistance, reducing the current through humans. and of course, there are RCDs if there is a severe problem.

That number has nothing to do with the issue.

Again, the 60 amp number is meaningless in the context of average use for t he distribution grid. Sports finals tea kettles vs. heating system kicking on and off.

I think the problem they are talking about is the poor quality of the cable with the aluminum sheath. Over the years they give up the ghost.

The generation capacity is around 50 GW. I don't know for sure, but Bill, the guy with the 2 kW number, works in the industry.

"And as I stated in previous other subject postings, when a new housing est ate has its electrical network loading calculated the cable sizes are calcu lated on a loading of no more than 2kW per household. This is of course usi ng diversity in the calculations as not every one has everything switched o n at the same time."

Not according to Bill.

Do you have a means to charge at home? Trips longer than one charge can be a bummer if you get a car with a shorter range. But they are obviously ch eaper. You will save significantly on fuel costs, over the life of the car it will nearly pay for the car.

If the UK can't build power generation in 10 years, I think there is no hop e for the UK. Maybe the Germans should have won the war. You would not ha ve any power shortage if they were running things.

Even if you drive short distances, charging an electric car becomes a nuisance.

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I have wondered the same and not just mains voltages but also to some old non-SI units, such as pounds.

In seriously built-up urban areas there is so much necessity to park on public roads; very few people have the luxury of a parking space in front of their homes, so kerbside charging would be the only realistic option. Can't see that happening for a good while yet.

Really? That's about 7-8 hours. Truckers do that without breaking a sweat. I do it when I drive to TN or back.

Doesn't that rather depend on the size of the battery???

Charging is rated in kW. I don't see how any other metric is useful or practical. Some people try to rate them as MPH. But that also depends on the car.

Gosh, someone even more ignorant than Larkin!

Let me repeat myself yet again. Charge at home, always have a full battery in the morning and never have to drive to a busy, smelly, nasty gas statio n again. Also, now regular maintenance, no oil changes, no noise... just the smoothest power you've ever felt in a car!

Rather than have guessing games among Americans as to what the situation in the UK is, just ask the Brits direct!

Exactly.

Aren't we all supposed to be dead by now, according to Gore's apocalyptic hockey stick? ;-)

The maximum draw per single domestic socket outlet is 13A. HOWEVER, most homes can legitimately have up to 60A -100A by taking a dedicated spur off the house's consumer unit/distribution board. The general limit per domestic installation is limited by the power co's fuse which is generally 100A maximum. I'm sure that's plenty for even an American. ;-)

No one in the right mind would attempt to charge an EV from a 13A socket (unless time was not a consideration.) ;-)

It sure would be for me. I park on the street, not always in the same place.

And I don't want my food choices limited to joints close to charging stations.

Teslas rarely show up at ski areas in the dead of winter.

UK house supplies are earthed. Typical current supply capacity to a house is 60A- 100A at 230V. So no problem there.... The problem will come with mass takeup, which won't happen.Fortunately there will always be just a gradual takeup.The infrastructure is just not there to allow lots of households to charge their cars. I often wonder what would happen if oil ran out... armageddan ?

On a sunny day (Sun, 16 Jun 2019 09:45:09 -0000 (UTC)) it happened Cursitor Doom wrote in :

Not only that, according the the Club Of Rome wisecracks, there would be no more oil and the sidewalks would be full of people. I think they did the simulations in BASIC on the first IBM PC

Like Gore, they were / are? no scientists, but politicians .. with an agenda.

Keeping the people like a puppet on a string and creating fear to rule them.

And they still play the same game today:

It is a higher probablility that the next war (Iran?) that US is trying to provoke will unite all countries of the world (Russia, China, Europe, India, Pakistan, others) in a direct nuclear attack on N America. They will be happy with a boat crossing the Atlantic or Pacific looking for an not-polluted island or place. Those that cross in their bathtub should not pull the plug,

I ain't kidding you not some fugitive migrant guy tried to cross the north sea in a home made raft. Some fishing boat spotted him of the coast, and the coastgard picked him up an handed him to the police:

What a boat ;-(

What people will do in desperation.

They are proffesional drivers. The big difference is that an engineer or salesman is expected to do at least a half a days work in addition to his travel time to and from the client.

Not as much as you might think since apart from a few outliers all the car batteries are similar capacities and the charger adapts to them.

They are remarkably vague about the actual kW rating beyond advising that people with pacemakers should stand well back. eg

In the UK no-one with any sense uses electricity for space heating and about half don't use it for cooking either. Mains gas is the method of choice for hot water and CH and is typically a 10-20kW unit in its own right the electricity used is only for the CH pump about 200W max.

It strikes me that the old style electric cookers and rigid timing of dinner in the 1950's puts a fairly hard bound on what the local grid was designed for as at least 4kW peak per household at that period.

Where I live oil or solid fuel is the default for heating since we have no mains gas service in the village (despite being in the dead zone of one of the UK's highest pressure trunk gas mains).