EV charging provision as part of new build planning permission?

They may not switch you off, just make using your EV charger extremely expensive to the point you change your behaviour to comply with the suppliers intentions.


When I was at school back in the late 60's and early 70's we were told that electricity from nuclear would be so cheap it would not be worth metering, we would be able to have an unlimited supply for a small standing charge, that prophecy didn't come true.

We could go the same way as France and have agreed maximum demands to get cheaper tariffs and have a maximum demand main trip that will disconnect the installation if you go for example over 40-amps.


Andy Betteridge.

Part of the reason was that huge political pressure was applied to not build nuclear because the proponents could not understand the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Labour and lib dems still want no nuclear. It is impossible to build either power stations or storage facilities because of political protest. Just what do they want? This should be a severe warning link here.

Monday 23rd March 2020 is hardly the day to be arguing about the power of "Big brother" considering the legislation that is due to be passed today.

A few points:


UK didn't develop more nuclear because we had a stack of North Sea Gas - unlike France, which Mrs T used to keep costs down for UK PLC (and give the miners a thoroughly good shoeing)


France is about twice the UK land area with a similar population - parts of it are extremely rural - so deploying 100A services to each and every house isn't (wasn't) feasible - hence their well developed Nuclear Generation, gets shared very effectively across the nation


I've just had costs back for a power supply to new build house in France - I can select from a little as 4kVA capacity - if I select 12kVA (there phase) I can run my heat pump etc without to much bother, I'm planning about 4kVA of PV. Provided I manage my loads for heating, hot water, catering and EV Charging I can make it work on 12kVA with no PV contribution. I do have to put capital however into buffering, HWS Storage etc.


I'm not convinced that switching from Gas to Electricity and switching from Petrol/Diesel to Electricity is such a problem in practice - sensible tariff structures (acting as both carrot and stick) along with modest investment in continuously improving infrastructure seems perfectly reasonable. What really needs to happen is understanding of the system architecture by Joe Public and what the implications if their decisions are. It's not difficult to see a scenario where Mr Sales Rep has two batteries - one in the vehicle and one on charge (probably from Solar).


To use the Coronavirus analogy - we have enough food, we just need to even out demand. The power system won't cope with the equivalent of a £1 billion increase in food sales in 3 weeks - but it will cope when coupled with a combination of putative and incentivized demand tariffs


Regards


OMS

I have just had a phone conversation with a landlord who has had a letter from the local council asking what he is doing to get a flat up to the minimum EPC rating by the 1st April 2020, I have already sent him a quote saying that we should be able to reduce the winter time electric bill by at least £35 per week for this one bedroom flat from the current £50 to £60 the tenant is paying by installing two new High Heat Retention storage heaters along with some other tweaks to the lighting and water heating.


It's not necessarily what you've got in the way of any electricity supply, it's the way that you use it.


Andy Betteridge

Chris Pearson:

davezawadi:

Part of the reason was that huge political pressure was applied to not build nuclear because the proponents could not understand the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

AFAIK, it is necessary to process the fuel for a bomb in a reactor, so the real reason for building power stations after WWII was to support the weapons programme. The fact that the heat could be turned into electricity was a bonus. Now, of course, we just need the power.

 

Which is why we built Calder Hall and ran fuel cycles every year, to get enough Plutonium to keep the chaps at AWRE gainfully employed in producing the buckets of instant sunshine


We haven't produced weapons grade plutonium for about 30 years


Regards


OMS

We do have quite a bit of plutonium in odd places. Parliamentary brief on Pu stock in 2016   an old doc, but not much of it will have decayed since.

To produce weapons grade Pu the fuel can only remain in the reactor for a short time, 3-6 months. After this time to many of the other isotopes of Pu are produced which interefere with the operation of the weapon. The early designs of reactor were optimised for Pu production, especially the UK Magnox with on line refueling. The US water cooled designs had to be shut down to refuel. Most of the current reactor designs are minor improvements on these but still have very low fuel burn up compared to what is possible.

The various new small reactor designs are much better optimised for power production and hopefully we will see some working prototypes in the next few years.