Barriers to EV uptake - network reinforcement

Conor

Electric vehicles are only suitable for city travel low milage non polluting run abouts

Trucks and heavy goods long distance will always be diesel or petrol as this is the most economical way forward.

Even HS2 should be diesel as huge reduction in installation and running costs make it totally economical outside of cities.

I think this is an over simplification, that diesel oil will have to be made from something. Even if we ignore the climate change and environmental pollution concerns, some thought about how we make it now, from the decay products of plants and animals that lived in the dinosaur era, many  now extinct, reveals an obvious problem, Currently we are burning all this material at a rate somewhere between 100,000 and 1000,000 times faster than it was created initially, so it will at some point all be used up, or more accurately the small amount of stuff left, presumably the least useful and in the most inaccessible places. will eventually become so  expensive that it will never be used for fuel.

At that point there probably will not be trucks as we know them, perhaps electric cars will ride on electric railways for longer journeys, or overhead electrification of motorways will be required -perhaps some sort of pantagraph charging scheme.

The future will not look like the recent past, sadly I think that is all we can say with much confidence.

Mike

As far as I can tell based on SSE round here, the DNO is busy enough maintaining what it has on a 'fire brigade' basis (sometimes quite literally fire brigade actually), with not much slack for anything that looks like planning ahead for supplying all  3 phases to each house and fatter street cables generally.  The infrastructure is dated, most of it more than half a century old, and some sections are pre-war, and is certainly already creaking a bit at the current level of 5 to 10 amps per house average.

It is worth looking at a typical DNOs ADMD figures for new housing, which are around the 2kw per house mark, and realize these numbers, used to size substations, street cabling and the 11 and 33kV distribution behind it, are  quite a bit more generous than previous versions used to size the network we currently have in many places.  If too many houses suddenly become a 30A load, or for that matter a  generator in sunny weather, the whole thing is way out of balance relative to the original cable sizing assumptions.

Most of the DNOs publish their LV network design rules and loading assumptions on the web, some require an email sign up, but they may be worth a quick read to calibrate expectations - 70 houses each phase with a 100A cut out may well share a couple of  400A fuses per phase at a 500kVA substation for example.

The BEAMA report is interesting but light on detail, and I do not believe for a moment that earth mats at substations will be the dominant future cost (figure 7) - if that was it we could start driving steel scaff poles instead. I think street cables and house supplies will dominate, and I am surprised they are not mentioned. Maybe the last leg of the LV network is not sexy enough for BEAMA to consider. (but without it the lights go out ! )

Mike.