Electric Vehicles - Impact on electrical network. Survey of vehicle uptake.

I agree.  I have now been using  Nissan Leaf since December.  Being retired, I don't commute any more (hurrah) but it would do the 45 mile round trip that I used to do very comfortably and easily get recharged overnight.  I get around 3.5m/kWh.  At 16p/kWh, that's 4.6 p/mile. If you put your foot down it's noticeably less - you won't get 3.5m/kWh at a steady 70mph on the motorway.

Now the summer's here, I try to charge the car during the day and so use the solar PV.  The Type 2 charger, plugged into a 13A socket, doesn't actually pull 13A - it charges at the rate of about 2.5kW (interestingly it's constantly changing slightly, according to my power meter.  I don't know why.)  So if the sun's shining it's free as it generates more than 2.5kW.  I'm a participant in (a guinea pig for) the Powerloop project and should soon have a Quasar 26A bi-directional DC charger/discharger as Powerloop is a V2G experiment (Octopus, UK Power Networks and others).  There's been a delay getting the G100 device approved to ensure that there is no possibility of the house putting 26A (from the EV) +16A (from the solar PV) back into the mains at the same time.  I accept a fixed price tariff for the sake of the experiment .My hunch is that the network could handle 10A in most houses overnight - not nearly as bad as the storage heaters many used to have.  I plan to install a heat pump shortly - but this house is atypical and I only need a little one ~2kW.

I agree.  I have now been using  Nissan Leaf since December.  Being retired, I don't commute any more (hurrah) but it would do the 45 mile round trip that I used to do very comfortably and easily get recharged overnight.  I get around 3.5m/kWh.  At 16p/kWh, that's 4.6 p/mile. If you put your foot down it's noticeably less - you won't get 3.5m/kWh at a steady 70mph on the motorway.

Now the summer's here, I try to charge the car during the day and so use the solar PV.  The Type 2 charger, plugged into a 13A socket, doesn't actually pull 13A - it charges at the rate of about 2.5kW (interestingly it's constantly changing slightly, according to my power meter.  I don't know why.)  So if the sun's shining it's free as it generates more than 2.5kW.  I'm a participant in (a guinea pig for) the Powerloop project and should soon have a Quasar 26A bi-directional DC charger/discharger as Powerloop is a V2G experiment (Octopus, UK Power Networks and others).  There's been a delay getting the G100 device approved to ensure that there is no possibility of the house putting 26A (from the EV) +16A (from the solar PV) back into the mains at the same time.  I accept a fixed price tariff for the sake of the experiment .My hunch is that the network could handle 10A in most houses overnight - not nearly as bad as the storage heaters many used to have.  I plan to install a heat pump shortly - but this house is atypical and I only need a little one ~2kW.