From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
A few weeks ago, the government announced plans for new regulations, requiring domestic electric car chargers be programmed only to work at off peak times.
This was clear admission that car charging would simply overload the grid, if drivers charged up during the evening as most likely would.
It appears there is more that we were not aware of, as one reader has received this message from Vodafone:
LeasePlan UK also cover this on their pro EV website:
Forget about all the weasel words – the plan is clear; if the grid is overloaded, we can forget about charging our cars at night. We can only charge up when the National Grid says we can.
We can only charge up when the National Grid says we can. – article
So, the reality is that The They want us to use these rolling deathtraps, but they don’t want us to keep them in working order, which means that we can’t really use them…. or something.
Yeah, I’ll stick with the ICE vehicles, and if I have to, I’ll go back to the horse and buggy thing. Cain’t nobody keep me from moving around at free will that way. Besides, horses drop fresh fertilizer on the roadsides, so there’s a benefit in that part, too.
Well, there’s always hydrogen..
There is always shank’s mares. And I dribble fresh liquid fertilizer on the roadside.
You guys haven’t had to walk into a headwind of about 30MPH in a base temperature of about 3F, with a windchill in the subzeroes, have you? It’s really not much fun. Not only do your eyes water, they form icicles on your eyelashes, which melt in the store you’ve just gone into, and sleet covers you from head to toe in front, so that has to melt off, too.
Sometimes, the store takes pity on some of us and calls a taxi for us. 🙂 Just sayin’.
Stay warm.
Sara,
Weather does indeed vary, globally.
Your experiences aren’t mine [for which I’m glad];
Once walked – in still air – half a mile to the local rail station, when it was reputedly -18C [that must be close to 0 F], in South London. Very glad that was a one off.
Take care.
Auto
I haven’t?
I live at 45ºN 86ºW on an Island in Lake Michigan. At the moment it is an unseasonably warm 23ºF (11ºF chill) and heading sub-zero next week.
My exercise alternates indoor cycling, and a four mile walk around the block when I wear, for instance, double ‘pane’ goggles and full face cover. It is a real inconvenience t have to ‘clear’ my runny nose.
Just get yourself a pair of breeding mules and sell the future offspring to your brother in law at a reduced rate before they’re born.
I see the camel’s nose. What’s next? How about –
All new heat pumps must be wired thru a smart meter and capable of being shut off remotely.
All new kitchen stoves will be electric and must be wired thru a smart meter and capable of being shut off remotely.
All outside security lamps must be wired thru a smart meter and capable of being shut off remotely.
All new clothes dryers will be electric and must be wired thru a smart meter and capable of being shut off remotely.
All stock tank heaters must be wired thru a smart meter and capable of being shut off remotely.
All grain drying equipment must be wired thru a smart meter and capable of being shut off remotely.
Does anyone else see the provision of electricity moving from a community/customer driven resource to one where government controls what you get and when, i.e., a 5 year plan?
Does this sound like Prohibition in the U.S. where black market booze became the norm? Does the government not realize the black market solutions that will be implemented. How about neighbors kicking in for a shared generator and black market fuel?
You sound like someone having an a-ha! moment.
Shhhh. Keep it to yourself. The government does not need any help in circumventing folks doing what they gotta do to keep moving around.
What’s next after the Kamala’s nose? Why, the hump of course.
aye “internet of everything” becomes “government control of everything”
Really, it sounds more like what William of Normandy inflicted on the locals when he took his army to England, and his demands (all forestry off limits for development and/or firewood production, to simplify it) , as hunting in a forest was the RIGHT of the KING, and no others!!!
https://earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk/reference/essays/forest-law/
When you read through that, you will see that there is not a whole lot of difference between what the “King” demanded and what BoJo is trying to do now. When is he going to be kicked out on his backside?
Just so you all over there in Britain know, you have my deepest sympathies, and there is squabbling going on over here about getting US gas and other petroleum fuel users. It won’t do a single bit of good to shut off access to carbon-based fuels, but when you’re large and stupid (and not to bright to begin with), it’s easy to be talked into doing something dimwitted.
Leftists believe human nature is mutable and if it is decreed, it will happen.
Black market booze will come back in style to power any remaining ICE vehicles and possibly the generators you mentioned.
In a similar vein, on the BBC Today programme on October 8th, just after 07:10 they interviewed Dale Vince from EcoTricity. He rather let the cat out the bag about smart meters but the interviewer didn’t understand what he’d just been told. He let it pass completely unremarked.
Vince’s exact phrase, relating to how smart meters would help manage intermittent supply, is they allow suppliers to “…turn down demand…”.
Think about that for a moment. “…turn down demand…”
On one hand a Texas winter catastrophe might potentially be averted if you could force all thermostats down to 60F in a crisis rather than just politely asking for cooperation in news releases. On the other hand such absolute control opens the door for corruption.
ya think? Imagine if the Government could turn off the electricity of everyone who was registered for the “wrong” party, a member of the “wrong” religion, the wrong race, or who protested at their school board meeting against CRT.
China is already setting up a “social credit” system, where the computer can analyze everywhere you go, and everything you do. Right now its mostly the Uyghurs who get sent to the slave labor camps. But imagine a government that can decide your “social credit” score is too low to be allowed to use any electricity !
The only person I know in my village with an electric car is an paediatric intensive-care nurse, who works shifts.
Good luck getting back to work for the night-shift.
“as one reader has received this message from Vodafone:”
There is nothing about this from Gov website unless this document is sufficiently misinterpreted to fit a view point:
Electric Vehicle Smart Charging (publishing.service.gov.uk)
Wow…page 10 “Phase 2” is so 1984….
And that meter installation costs someone (OPM, so technically”free”) what $500 in fully loaded costs?
currently an electric supply company (Octopus) has a 4 hour period 00:30 to 04:30 for BEV owners. All energy during this period is supplied at LT 1/3 the standard rate. The same company also has an agile tariff that charges based on 0.5 hourly wholesale rate. This can be / is very expensive or actually negative. Smart charging can use either of these tariffs but you still have the opportunity to override the switch and simply charge.
I’m surprised no one here has brought up the radiation from these meters causing covid!!
No problem. Just buy a honkin big diesel generator and use that to charge your EV “off the grid”.
But EV’s will make lovely paperweights.
Fancy chicken coops in the backyard.
What is to keep someone from hooking the EV charger to, say, a drier outlet or otherwise circumventing this metering scheme? It might make sense from a load balancing standpoint but putting a tax on it seems problematic.
LMAO…at the suckers who are buying into this EV junk. Seen a number of EV on the side of the road in my travels. Just shake my head and chuckle. Now this. Further entertainment at the expense of the seriously mentally impaired EV owners.
Easy solution: use a generator to charge the car “off grid”
I know it defeats the purpose, but the only way to win in clown world is to out-clown everybody
umm, likely roadbed coils will discharge your battery into the grid as you drive to ensure that those who charged the “proper way” get to use your electrons…
“…plus it also allows the EV battery to be drained into the grid if required”.
I’m pretty sure even a greenie knows how to unplug an electrical connection when it suits them.
The smart meter networked to the internet would rat you out to the bureaucrats charged with enforcing these things. It’s the same mindset as that controlled TV licenses in the UK for decades and drove around in RF sniffer vans outfitted to find unlicensed TVs in the UK.
So Unplugging your EV to deprive the grid of your car’s charge gets you a negative social credit score (SCS) in a Chinese-style state. Your ability to shop at the best state-run stocked stores will be curtailed as a result of a bad SCS. You will be socially shamed as a selfish electricity hoarder in such a state.
So this happened in the UK? Wait till Elon hears about this.
This is revealing the fundamental problems with the UK Net Zero project.
It consists of the following:
But these things cannot all be done simultaneously.
We see one reason here, that moving vehicles to EVs will impose too much of a peak load on the grid. However on examination this will also turn out to be true of heat pumps. Peak demand for electricity, if both of these things are done, will occur in a calm period with a blocking high in January or February. These occur just about every winter and typically last 10+ days. Between 6 and 10pm on a weekday with neither wind nor solar generation a huge load will arrive as people get home, plug in their cars, turn on their heatpumps and water heaters, and get ready to make dinner. If nothing changes, the grid will fall over.
Fortunately however the Government seems to have realized this, and will be taking steps to prevent cars from charging.
You can expect the next step to be that smart meters will be required for the heat pumps, and they can be stopped from being used.
The fact is that the UK grid in its present shape cannot support the increased load from the projected EV and heat pumps even in the spring and autumn. Once you convert it to wind and solar, its game over. The first hard winter will get whichever government is in power at the time exiled for a generation. The death rate among the old and poor will be enormous.
This is not all. Its also, at the same time as home heating is converted from gas to heat pumps, to convert the gas supply to hydrogen. This will be vastly expensive because the pipe systems, both in street and indoors, will have to be swapped out, and the appliances changed out. It will not be like the conversion from coal gas to North Sea gas, because of the permeability of piping to hydrogen. In the coal gas replacement case the same piping could be used and the appliances retrofitted. This will not be the case with the projected move to hydrogen.
But it gets better. After everyone has been converted to heat pumps and electric cookers, there isn’t going to be anyone left using gas to buy the hydrogen that the country has so expensively converted its piping to deliver. No-one will buy all those expensive new appliances. They will have already been converted to heat pumps.
And in addition, there is anyway no cost effective source of hydrogen to deliver to all these appliances that no-one is buying or using over the network that has now been converted. Well, not only is there no cost effective source, there is no source at all and no concrete plans to get any.
By the way, to convert to heat pumps also requires all out insulation to a very high standard. But it also requires new radiators, because they will not reach temperatures as high as gas or oil fired ones. And I am reading that this will also mean larger bore piping.
Its completely irrational. Even were it to be done, even were the UK to get to the fabled Net Zero, it would have reduced total global emissions by 450 million tons out of 37 billion. And that is before the rest of the world carries on increasing as it industrializes and grows its economies using fossil fuel, oil, gas, coal, what do they care?
Its a colossal diversion from thinking about and planning to fix the nation’s real problems.
When has micromanagement by government ever worked?
What did Socialists have before EV’s?
Drivable cars.
Lenin had a Rolls-Royce, in fact he may have had as many as eleven. Strictly speaking they were not his, they belonged to the people in the guise of the Soviet state. I’m not sure how many peasants got to drive them though.
Plan A. Keep your ICE vehicles as long as possible.
Plan B. Buy a gas generator that kicks in when there is a load (i.e., car is plugged in), but there is no commercial power flowing. Electronics also include a diode-like circuit that allows power to flow only in one direction (battery cannot be drained).
Plan C. Buy second EV. Always have one plugged into Plan B circuitry, so you always have a car that has a full charge.
When you buy a house, get one with a double or triple garage to hide it all. Yeah, I know. None of this will be cheap. Start saving now.
It depends how serious they get about implementing it all. But one scenario is, in the country, its back to the fifties of the last century. Have a bike to get by back roads to shopping in the nearest market town. Install solid fuel stoves, if you can an Aga or similar stored heat range. Yes, it requires filling and emptying twice a day, but you will be warm and will have some hot water.
The Amish with their horse drawn buggies will be laughing their ass off at people trying to get to the store with bikes on snowy or wet roads.
This will also mean that your own solar panels won’t be allowed to charge your car.
You should do the calculation on how much Solar PV install you’d need to charge a typical EV from 20% to 80% in the 6 hours from 9am to 3pm local time assuming a sunny day an optimal PV panel tilt angle to insolation. It’s an eye popping number I assure you. It’s been done here at WUWT many times over the years. Most people don’t have to property available for the required area even if they had the money for the solar PV panels.
The government needs that power more than you do.
What’s next a dog collar to shock if you get too close to car at peak usage!
Essentially you will have no car. They also want kill switches on cars.
Few things are more dangerous than enthusiastic idiots making plans for others.
Yeah, in the US the latest “covid relief” bill signed by Brandon mandates all new cars are required to have kill switches, supposedly within 5 years. Who gets to control those kill switches? That’s an open question, one only the “paranoid” are asking at the moment.
Tesla owners have long understood the networked nature of their vehicle and the remote control that offers. And already there are kill switches on most new cars, including ICE vehicles. You just don’t know it.
https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/news/crime/2016/01/21/cops-use-onstar-to-disable-suspects-engine-and-end-high-speed-chase/117107636/
Next up, EV “Animal Farm”.
This aspect of the shift to EVs has been ignored from the start. There is not adequate infrastructure to support home-charged EVs — not enough power lines, not enough transformers, not enough amps delivered to home in the power drops, not enough juice on the grid.
While EVs make sense, the shift has to be gradual and must be demand-based. People have to want them, not be forced to have them. With a demand-based shift, users will buy EVs when they see that EVs are cheaper, more convenient, sexier, cooler, or otherwise more desirable. Demands-based shifts come gradually and will naturally depend on costs of upgrading local power grids, installing new power lines pole-to-home, upgrading home power panels and the cost of the electricity itself (which is a local issue).
If governments want to support the shift, they need to pour money into grid improvement, increasing electrical supply (SMR nuclear, probably), bringing down the cost of electrical power, subsidizing efficient home chargers — and a lot more.
Instead of making EV ownership-for-all possible, the current plan seems to be penalizing gasoline car ownership and attempting to destroy gasoline-powered automobile supply.
“Not enough juice on the grid”
Especially when you start to consider all the other things that will need electrification.
For example, Network Rail has been looking at the efficiencies of various forms of rail traction in the UK and overhead line electrification came out top at 80%, battery traction at 65%, hydrogen and diesel both at 25%. The overhead line electrification would require electrifying 13,000 kilometres of currently unelectrified track which would take decades to deliver. (Note battery traction was deemed suitable for only 800 kilometres of track)
Go to Europe and 46% of its rail infrastructure is unelectrified
Dave ==> I don’t have the chops to do the calculation, but calculate the amount of energy currently used to move automobiles around — number of gallons of gasoline burned times energy produced — and convert to MwH of electricity needed to be added to the grid.
It took 100 years to build the electrical grid we have today….how much time is needed to double it?
If it physically can’t happen, it won’t. Physics rules the day. What will happen, per plan, is energy poverty and people forced to public transportation and the end to suburban sprawl so that the King’s forests will no longer be cleared for more single family housing 30 + miles from where those residents would would toil for a peasants wage in a hyper-inflating economy.
And that’s being optimistic.
Network Rail estimate it would take £30 billion over 30 years to electrify the lines needed. As usual any programme that big is inevitably going to overrun on both factors although the big problem they have at the moment is that the Treasury has blocked the plans
Dave:
What do the percentages signify? feasibility? Coverage? I can’t imagine a scenario in which battery locomotives would be practical on more than a trivial percentage of the rail network.
Alan, I did a reply to you yesterday but it seems to have disappeared into the ether.
The percentages were based on a comment by Siemens that the efficiences of various forms of traction from the original energy source to power at the wheels is electrification 80%, battery power 65%, hydrogen 25%, diesel 25%.
As for the battery trains I have seen estimates of 500 and 800 kilometres of track either of which is trivial compared to the total amount of track needing electrification.
As I commented to Kip yesterday the whole thing is now in limbo because the Treasury has recently blocked the plans.
Kip:
I’m astonished there hasn’t been more discussion of the system upgrades required to support electrification of transportation and domestic heating, as demanded by UK climate initiatives.
In the US, pretty much any new residential construction will have 200 Amp @ur momisugly 240 VAC service, as we generally expect to need air conditioning. The house I grew up in was built in 1932 and as built had 60 Amp service. This was upgraded to 200 Amp in 1967/68 (?) when my parents installed central air conditioning. It would be interesting to look back at the distribution upgrade projects US utilities must have had to support widespread A/C adoption in the 60’s and 70’s. Other common 240 V appliances are clothes driers, kitchen ranges and ovens. Some residences not served by gas also have electric water heaters. Even so, with 200 Amp service there is adequate headroom to support home EV charging at a modest rate. Whether the residential service loop can support significant additional load is another question, but if EV charging is deferred until A/C use has stopped or abated significantly and cooking and laundry is over, I would think it could.
I lived for one year (1979) in an all-electric condo in New Hampshire and after the first winter month’s electric bill I bought a kerosene space heater to keep the main common room warm and wore sweaters constantly. Not a fan of electric heating. I still have that kerosene heater and have broken it out on occasions when we have extended power outages in winter.
Anyway, with limited searching I found one source stating the typical UK residential service was either 50 or 100 Amp @ur momisugly 230 VAC, as most homes don’t have central A/C. There is obviously a lot less spare capacity here to take on additional load. And I would assume the local distribution loop capacity is also less than in the US by a comparable factor.
So to support widespread EV ownership plus conversion of gas appliances to electric, the typical UK residence would need a main panel upgrade, a higher capacity distribution transformer, and an upgraded distribution loop back to the substation. It’s likely some proportion of substations will require upgrading. And of course this all assumes there will be adequate generation output to supply the additional power demand.
Alan ==> Yes, you are correct. Our American home still has 60 amp service when we moved in in the mid-1980s. When a tree limb took out the service line, the utility required that we upgrade — new main panel, new drop wires, etc.
Still, out mostly electric home couldn’t support two two Ultra-fast EV chargers — either the wife or I would have to wait for our cars to charge.
EV’s make sense for a small minority of car owners. The rest, not so much.
Kip Hansen: “Instead of making EV ownership-for-all possible, the current plan seems to be penalizing gasoline car ownership and attempting to destroy gasoline-powered automobile supply.”
Biden’s people know full well there won’t be sufficient EV infrastructure available to support a move by most current drivers into mostly EV cars.
Their true but unsaid plan is to force most all of today’s car owners into mass transit. Just like it was in 1920, the majority of the population will be using buses and trains to get where they need to go, or else use a bicycle, or else walk.
BK ==> What mass transit? Those who live anywhere north of Westchester County, in what we call “Upstate New York” there is no mass transit that could possibly suffice to take people from their homes to their workplaces. It simply doesn’t exist outside of NY City.
They are saying in effect “your battery is my battery”. You pay for the batteries and the electricity but they have complete control over it. Welcome to the REAL world.
They’re saying your charge is my charge if the State wants it. You can have all the dead batteries you want to buy. Charging them is another matter.
The Uber rich will though be able to afford the purchase of carbon offsets to have the lifestyle they “deserve.”
Brings new meaning to the term “EV charging”…
A misrepresentation… this just enables truly smart charging, which will work to the advantage of the individual EV owner as well as the grid (allowing you to charge your car at the cheapest time/rate)
Nowadays, conservatives, and most skeptics are, always look for the government power grab first, as if the government never did or could do anything useful. OTOH, for liberals, there is no problem that does not have a government solution.
There is very little that the government does that is useful, and most of those were covered by the middle to late 1800’s.
Besides roads, fire protection, police, 911, national defense, Social Security, most schools, etc., etc., etc. You can’t have a civil and successful society without social cooperation, i.e., government. But I’m certainly not one to think every problem has or needs a government solution.
Police/fire/hospital and 911 are pretty much the same thing. 911 is nothing more than a more efficient way to contact emergency services.
With the exception of Social Security, everything on your list was already in place by the early 1800’s.
Social Security is not something that government is needed for, in fact Social Security has been a giant Ponzi scheme that made early retirees wealthy at the cost of impoverishing everyone else.
That kind of scam can only be run by government. Anyone else would end up in jail.
You seem to believe that social cooperation is only possible when government forces everyone to cooperate.
I recommend to you Ferdinand Tönnies’ 1885 Community and Civil Society that exactly contrasts community with civil society. The latter depends on regulation to maintain civility envisioned by the elites.
A community, on the other hand, has tradition, roles and mores, of an extended ‘family’.
You seem to intentionally overlook the compulsory nature of the mandates, and that the “fine control” of the charging means no charging, and even discharging regardless of the driver’s needs. You lie again Griff, and you blindly accept the lies being told. You are a good little sheep Griff.
I suggest you use a little forward-thinking, Griff: What happens when tens of millions of EV owners all take advantage of charging at the cheapest time/rate? It would be a good mental exercise for you to consider the impacts on the upstream electrical systems. Especially, more solar generation would add to their woes.
Charging at the cheapest rates can be done without the government having full control of your charger.
They also don’t need the ability to drain your battery in order to let you charge at the lowest rate.
No, its rationing. It making sure you only charge your car when there is adequate capacity on the grid. Similarly, the next step will be to only allow heat pump use when there is spare capacity.
That means not between 6pm and 11pm, which is when everyone needs the power.
Its not an option, its a mandate.
The underlying problem is simple. The grid in its present state cannot supply the increased level of demand the heat pump and EV proposals will require. When its switched over to wind and solar it will be even less able to do it.
So the only solution, short of uncontrolled large scale power outages nationwide, is to selectively switch off demand, and this will be for heat pumps and car charging.
The cars will be inconvenient. But when its done to heat pumps the old and poor will die. And multi fuel stove use in the countryside will soar, so the end result will be that carbon emissions will not fall.
And this is not even considering the increased cost of running the heat pumps, which will also fall worst on the old and poor.
But we are saving the planet, aren’t we…?