Today the Telegraph published an opinion piece I wrote on electric cars, linked here. My sources for the article are listed at the bottom of this post.
Of course, this is an opinion piece for a newspaper, so it’s written in a particular way – some people have commented negatively on this, but opinion columns are supposed to be opinionated!
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When I first wrote about EVs in the first year of my blog, I was quite interested in the wider possibilities, in particular the use of re-cycled batteries for storage and the nascent V2G space (use of electric cars to provide grid services, “vehicle-to-grid”). Since then, I have got a lot less interested. In my previous Telegraph article, I discussed the limitations of hydrogen as a key enabler of net zero, it’s main benefit being the fact that it burns in air without giving off caron dioxide. The popularity of EVs has similar origins – no tailpipe emissions. But this does not make them “clean” or sustainable, as I outline in the article above.
That deals just with the limitations of EVs on a stand-alone basis. But there are other challenges: in particular the need to build new electricity grid infrastructure, and the issue with battery safety and disposal. The widely touted benefits of V2G are far from apparent, and yet to be captured in real-world settings.
Extensive charging and grid infrastructure required to support EVs
EV charging infrastructure is currently limited, and drivers report frequent problems with charging points either being occupied or faulty meaning they cannot charge when they need to. Even with fast charging, EV charging takes longer than it does to fill a petrol or diesel tank, and some parts of the country still have limited coverage, particularly in rural areas. Other issues drivers face relate to lack of interoperability between various apps and payment methods.
As of 1 July 2023, there were 44,020 public EV charging devices installed in the UK, within which 8,461 were rated “rapid” devices (19% of all charging devices), and 24,918 (57%) were rated “fast” chargers (“rapid” chargers are faster than “fast” chargers). 21,294 (48%) were designated as “destination” chargers, while 14,848 (34%) were designated as “on street” chargers. The total number of chargers increased by 10% between 1 April and 1 July 2023. It’s difficult to get a good picture of the location of these chargers – the Government acknowledges data uncertainty, but it also reports on a local authority basis – some authorities cover wide geographic areas with low populations, making it appear they have a proportionally high number of charging points. However it is likely they are concentrated in populated areas with wide areas having low coverage.
Installation of charging points is just one issue. Significant challenges relate to supplying those points requiring both additional generating capacity and network infrastructure. The Climate Change Committee’s Sixth Carbon Budget Report in 2021 estimated that electric cars and vans could increase electricity demand by around 30 TWh by 2030, and 65-100 TWh by 2050. This compares to a system-wide electricity demand of 300 TWh today (projected to double or even treble by 2050). According to DESNZ and Ofgem, the electricity requirement for an electric vehicle is “almost three quarters of today’s typical household consumption”.
Ofgem in particular is pushing smart charging, in the belief that EVs will be a net benefit rather than net drain on the grid. However, this relies on untested assumptions about charging behaviour – will people charge their electric cars on a just-in-time basis similar to the way that conventional cars are fuelled, or will they treat them more like mobile phones and expect full charge ahead of each use? The latter could place considerable strain on electricity grids, particularly if owners try to charge their cars as soon as they come home from work, during the evening peak of electricity demand.
EVs have the potential to deliver significant benefits through V2G services, but they also have the potential to boost peak demand – which way things will work out is still unclear. Much will depend on whether the public trusts smart charging devices, and their providers – if not they will over-ride the smart features and activate on-demand charging. In this respect both Ofgem and the Government are somewhat shooting themselves in the foot by continually undermining public trust in suppliers, the very people who are likely to deliver these smart charging services.
Another problem relates to legacy looped grid connections. Historically, semi-detached properties shared a single grid connection with one house being connected to the grid via its connection to its neighbour. This is known as a looped connection. Electric car chargers require a 32 amp fuse and a lot of power to operate at their optimum level – DNOs will not allow an EV charge point to be installed onto a looped electricity connection, so a direct connection must first be installed. DNOs are gradually replacing looped systems anyway, but his will take time. In the meantime, households on looped systems will need either their own or their neighbours driveways or gardens to be dug up to accommodate a direct connection before an EV charger can be used.
Electric car battery safety and disposal
Two years ago, General Motors was forced to recall 140,000 of its electric Bolt model after a series of fires when drivers left their cars charging overnight. More recently, a fire which broke out on a cargo ship in the North Sea was attributed to an electric car – whether this turns out to have been the case or not, the fact remains that tackling EV fires is challenging. Firefighters have found that battery fires can reignite because self-oxidising lithium salts prevent them from being starved out. Extinguishing them can take thousands of gallons of water, far more than is needed to put out a fire in a conventional car. Such fires on a cargo ship are very difficult to contain. And cars are not the only source of problems with electric vehicles – electric scooters and bicycles have been linked to a number of deadly house fires, and are banned on public transport in places such as London.
While it is unclear whether EVs have a higher propensity to catch fire than an ICE car, it is not in doubt that they are harder to manage when they do happen, and present significant challenges. One problem with domestic EV fires is that isolation switches are not accessible making it difficult for firefighters to tackle them it being dangerous to spray water on fires involving a mains electricity connection – this is made even more hazardous if the home also has solar panels as evidenced by this serious incident in Germany last year.
While fire risks can be mitigated through the introduction of improved safety measures, the issue of battery disposal is more challenging (although this is also a cause of fires at waste management facilities). Lithium-ion batteries are toxic, and their fire risk increases when they are stored together, which is often the case when they are removed from cars at the end of their lives.
In theory recycled materials could supply more than half of the cobalt, lithium, and nickel in new batteries by 2040. However, unlike the batteries in ICE cars which can easily be dismantled, EV batteries are hard to recycle, and extracting their minerals is difficult, inefficient, expensive, and not particularly clean. Pyrometallurgy, the process used by many recyclers, involves melting down the batteries and burning off plastic separators to extract the metals. This process is energy-intensive, emits toxic gases and can’t recover some valuable minerals, including lithium, at all. A major expense in this process is transporting the batteries to the recycling facility – according to a recent study, about 40% of the overall cost of recycling is transportation.
EV battery packs are so massive they need to be shipped by truck in specially designed cases, often across very large distances, to reach centralised recycling facilities. Handling lithium-ion batteries is so demanding that dealerships generally ship the entire car to the recycling site rather than trying to extract the battery themselves, in other words shipping something four times heavier than needed. These handling costs are large enough to exceed the cost of mining fresh minerals for the production of new batteries – by one estimate, the cost of recycled lithium is five times that of virgin lithium from brine-mining.
“Lithium-ion battery makers have yet to develop the technology that can economically extract components in a form that can be used to make new lithium-ion batteries,”
– Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International
These costs, and the fact that most waste disposal facilities will not accept batteries due to the fire risk, increase the likelihood of illegal dumping of batteries, creating greater environmental challenges given their toxicity. Steps by Tesla and others to remove cobalt from EV batteries to make them cheaper also make them less appealing to recyclers. In any case, the UK does not currently have any plant for disposing of electric vehicle batteries, and there is only one plant capable of processing lithium-ion batteries in continental Europe.
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As one commentor wrote under the Telegraph article, EVs are most suited to situations where there are better alternatives and in particular public transport: short urban journeys. Given the energy intensity and material requirements of new EVs, the most sustainable option is to keep using existing cars until they fall apart – scrapping anything that is functional should have a high hurdle rate. For people who have low mileage, they may never drive enough to exceed the EV/ICE breakeven level, and so are actually better off driving conventional cars. For people who drive high mileage the question is why, and whether they could reduce this by combining public transport with the journey – when I travel to London I drive to the nearest mainline station and then take the train. Both of these undermine the need for electric cars.
It would be better to develop cleaner ICE cars for example using different fuel types, rather than switching to electric cars, however the current drive for EVs is undermining research and innovation in that space, since the investment case is unclear while governments push for EVs. This further enrenches what is a clearly sub-optimal solution. While governments are currenly nervous about a whole-hearted focus on hydrogen, they have shown no such reticence in the area of electric cars, something they may well come to regret.
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Telegraph article references
- Congolese cobalt mines
- Water disputes
- International Energy Agency EV minerals
- EV mileage breakeven studies
- EV mileage breakeven studies
- 2013 production emissions study
- EV reliability
- Running costs
- ZEV mandate consultation
- EU EV mandate
- Biden Administration EV mandate
- Inflation Reduction Act
- US pollution limits
- London ULEZ
- ULEZ extension
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve refused all nudges to get an EV company car, preferring instead to keep using a small collection of 40-50 year old classics, all well serviced and in good condition.
Hi Kathryn……another excellent post bearing news that 1000’s of EVers fail to acknowledge.
In the meantime I like many sit on the fence driving a Plug in Hybrid (PHEV).
There is a demand for PHEV’s suggesting I’m not alone in the uncertainty of where all this is heading.
I gather the few new state of the art EV charge hubs like Gridserve need a 5MW grid connection (100’s are needed now)
Tip of a melting iceberg…….I could go on……Barry Wright, Lancashire.
At some point during the transition from ICE to EV the existing filling station network will become uneconomic.
That will mean either fewer outlets and/or higher prices.
This will become more pronounced the deeper into the transition you go and is likely to disproportionately affect rural motorists who will find themselves having to drive long distances to fill up.
That might be the case but it’s some way off – I’d say at least a decade – and plenty of time for the government to change direction and decide it prefers a different approach, Germany persuaded the EU not to ban ICE cars outright so let’s see if they can come up with a clean fuel that fits the bill. That would ensure the future of filling stations as I imagine given the choice a lot of people would be happy to stay with an ICE car.
I have to drive 8 miles to fill up and 8 miles home again, since I live in a rural location. However, this is not additional mileage – Most fillups are at one of the supermarkets with a petrol station attached in town, occasionally at the Shell near Sainsbury if it has cheaper fuel. I’m good for 700 miles on a full tank so I could probably tour Scotland up to John O’Groats without filling up there at all. Filling station locations will continue where the demand is. Perhaps few in London, but since trucks will almost certainly continue to be diesel for many years to come (batteries kill payload and economics, resulting in huge bills for road damage too, since more journeys would be required to deliver the same tonnage of goods – increasing vehicle weight would result in even more road damage, which scales with the fourth power of axle weight) I’d bet on diesel being available anywhere there is a concentration of warehouses or one of our few remaining factories. EVs are not going to take over rural demand in a hurry. I saw that in Powys just 3% of company cars are EVs, despite the tax incentives. I agree that competition will eventually erode away from reasonable size cities – much as it has already in Scotland and Wales, where smaller towns only support a single petrol station, and many villages none at all. Costs of operation per litre rise as turnover falls, again reflected in rural pump prices already. Some cost is saved by cutting opening hours. Delivery cost would remain largely unchanged – just the frequency of road tankers would fall as demand lowered. We will probably lose more refineries, but that is being driven by net zero impositions on them rather than falling demand.
In rural locations you place a premium on being able to get around when it snows and the electricity pylons are down. You may need to drive to A&E: no point in waiting for an ambulance or taxi. This mouseover map of the current distribution of plug in car registrations helps illustrate the divide between the metropolitan and rural.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Ev4aW/1/
Map showing percentage of cars that are EVs/hybrids.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/h23OH/1/
‘And exactly how would the switch from petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles be managed? Would those who wanted to get the maximum working life out of their fossil-fuelled car, or who simply could not afford to replace their vehicle, be priced off the road by taxation, or, would they be immobilised because of the gradual disappearance of petrol stations in their area? Taxation is an interesting and not un-related issue. Fuel duty raised over £26 billion for the UK government in 2012-2013. That is a significant sum in the income column of the government’s accounts. Something would have to replace it. These are issues that would challenge a deeply-rooted dictatorship, let alone a democratically-elected government with a deficit to reduce, a huge debt to manage and a five-year term of office in which to impress an electorate which may, or may not, be sceptical about climate change, but is certainly sceptical about politicians and energy companies.’
I wrote this nearly 10 years ago in “Electricity supply: the British experiment’ (Mereo Books 2014).
They know all of this, including how dangerous are bev fires which are unextinguishable and can release nasty toxic gases such as hydrogen fluoride, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen cyanide. Consequently all that can be done is to contain or isolate them which is not possible on a ferry, on a channel tunnel train, motorway pile up, multistorey/underground car park , house garage, or service workshop.
As you say the correct way forward is to develop green hydrocarbon fuels. We could start by just converting all existing ices (including HGVs) to use natural gas/methane, which can be done relatively easily, is already less polluting than petrol and diesel, and outperforms bevs.
[Also continue to use natural gas for heating. So no gas or electrical grid upgrade costs and no replacement boiler or heat pump costs]
Then when nuclear energy is sufficiently cheap produce green methane via hydrogen from electrolysis followed by the Sabatier process. In addition/in the meantime some green methane can be supplied to the gas grid using anaerobic digestors, as is done already.
But the real reason for bevs is to make private transport too expensive and impractical except for an elite few. The real goal is 15 minute cities, public transport and “active travel”.
I am disappointed that you have fallen into the trap of not being up to date with some of your facts.
Firstly whilst it may be true that some cobalt has been obtained from dubious sources, the quantity used by industry as a whole is far more than could be mined by children. A quick google produced this:
Cobalt is also used to make airbags in automobiles; catalysts for the petroleum and chemical industries; cemented carbides (also called hardmetals) and diamond tools; corrosion- and wear-resistant alloys; drying agents for paints, varnishes, and inks; dyes and pigments; ground coats for porcelain enamels; high-speed …
Its use is far wider than in EVs and new battery chemistry is replacing it.
Efficient fossil fuel cars are still likely to produce more pollution than EVs and of course there is no CO2 at the tailpipe. In the UK most EVs are charged overnight when the CCGT is often close to being switched off with only 3-4 GW being produced to provide kinetic energy to maintain frequency.. The Electricity Retailers offer substantial rewards for overnight charging. In my case Octopus actually manage it for me, the rate of charge fluctuating with the availability/price of electricity. Most people will take advantage of the tariffs which range from 7.5p a kWh to around 12p depending on your provider and that you have a smart meter. Looking to the future there is likely more information from the ESO and DNOs as to when to charge too.
As for the horror stories about inadequate rapid chargers, these are mainly in the past, though the DNOs have been tardy implementing the projects that Ofgem approved over 18 months ago which in many cases were to provide up to 8 MW (my unit may be wrong 8MVA?) which should be enough to charge 100 cars simultaneously. The services at Exeter now have 36 Tesla chargers and 24 for other cars. There is a supermarket close by with another 6 and going to near Ashburton I believe there are 18. Some MSAs are still at 1 or 2 because of lack of power. As for unreliability, the horror stories centred around BP and Charge Place Scotland who took over the back office of a previous company that was clearly a shambles. Heads rolled at BP. The telephone handlers hadn’t had the training and engineers weren’t on the scene to fix the single charger causing a problem. It has now been noted by the charger providers that EV drivers will avoid single chargers and they now install clusters by and large.
One has to be careful as to who is paying for newspaper articles, often the naysayers are in the pocket of the fossil fuel companies. The motoring press get given the grand sport cars to play with so they don’t complain that they only do 30 mpg. Why should they, the car will arrive with a full tank and be handed back with an empty one. Save to say that the buying public appear to be pleased with their EVs and are increasingly buying them. Servicing is trivial in both what is required and the cost, Only when it comes to public charging do people complain, but then most people have installed a charger and charge cheaply. Those not fortunate enough to have a drive can in most areas run a cable across the pavement provided it is in a cable tidy and obvious. Oxfordshire are trialling channels in pavements.
In terms of power consumption for the future heat pumps are likely to consume more power than personal EVs. Lorries and public transport are likely to guzzle quite a bit and so will the railways. Covid and the lorry driver shortages have resurrected the rail freight industry but very little is pulled by electric engines. Most freight trains end or begin in places without electrification and there are issues with engines running between 25kV AC and 750V DC with the earthing arrangements. It is possible, Eurostar did it in the early years but it is far from ideal. Meanwhile the reliable Class 66 diesels are often deployed to run journeys where 70% is electrified but rather than hang around and block passenger lines they get on their way over the whole journey burning diesel.
If noise is pollution then the EV scores hands down.
Reliability of EVs has been an issue with some early cars and the need for software updates. In terms of mechanical breakdowns these are rare. Industrial electric motors go on for years, there is no clutch and no gearbox (just a single reduction gear.) and reverse is the motor going backwards managed by the software. Otherwise the software is much the same as most cars, air and throttle settings are not required the whole thing is much simpler. Brakes last 100,000 miles or more but often need attention because they haven’t been used enough.
Batteries can be and are repaired. The early Nissans used as taxis were often in for repair at about 200,000 miles where they had run their useful life as a taxi but with the swap of one or two cells could be on the road again as a useful runaround. Indeed the big battery cars which are very expensive do a disservice for those living and working in cities, because batteries are the expensive bit, for those who need a car for a 10 mile commute and week end shopping. If you need to do a long trip twice a year there are public chargers by the score now. Find one by a nice cafe or shopping centre or whatever. Or just read a book for 30 minutes, though you only need enough charge to complete your journey which is rarely to fill it to the top.
I disagree with almost all of your points, which are clearly written from a very pro-EV stance, through the most optimistic lens.
However I do wish to make it clear that the only payment I have received for writing these Telegraph articles is from the Telegraph itself, and the amount is not large enough that I would say something I would not otherwise say, nor have they asked me to. They simply asked “please can you write 1000 words about EVs” and I did.
People seem to be assuming I’m being paid by oil and gas companies – other than fee income (including from the Telegraph) no-one is paying me anything. I’m certainly not being paid to express views that are other then my own.
I’m afraid this is a very Panglossian view, which is only possible to adopt in the current circumstances of EVs being a tiny fraction of the total number of vehicles on the road.
I’d say wait until you start being charged car tax…
Don’t think hydrogen is benign. Hydrogen burnt in oxygen only produces water. Hydrogen burnt in air also produces water but the temperature achieved is sufficient to fuel the reaction of nitrogen from the air with oxygen to form nitrogen oxides. Nasty toxic pollutants.
Nor do I, I was simply pointing out that the basic property of not producing CO2 when it burns in air is the reason people are jumping on it as a “solution” to net zero…
Interesting as always, Katherine. I note some have challenged your statements on the use of mined materials in EV batteries. Some have said Cobalt is no longer used in modern EV batteries and that ICE cars use just as much if not less mined material as EVs (including oil, of course). I wonder what your response to them is?
Keep on keeping us thinking!
Yes, some producers are moving away from the use of cobalt which is a positive step (they are doing it because it makes the batteries cheaper, rather than for ethical reasons), but as I also mention, this greatly reduces the value of re-cycling whose primary benefit so far has been the extraction of cobalt. I’d say it’s too early to celebrate…
Just a comment about Life Cycle aspects…
Imperial College quantified embodied CO2 for several lithium-ion battery chemistries. The work is from 2020 and focussed on residential batteries, but is relevant to EVs. They state that ‘Most chemistries have embodied carbon footprints of around 200 kg CO2e per kWh of useable storage capacity’. This suggests that the latest 100kWh EV battery packs are responsible for around 20 tonnes of CO2 emitted during manufacture.
Compared to an ICE emitting 150g CO2 per km and travelling 10k km per annum, this equates to a simple CO2 payback of over 13 years. Obviously, CO2 payback times will be lower for counterfactual ICEs of higher emissions and higher mileages, and eVs with smaller battery packs, but the implications are interesting nonetheless
REF: Le Varlet T, Schmidt O, Gambhir A, Few S, Staffell I. Comparative life cycle assessment of lithium-ion battery chemistries for residential storage. Journal of Energy storage. 2020 Apr 1;28:101230.
available via Google Scholar.
Regards, Paul Rowley
One reason there is not much recycling of used lithium-ion car batteries is that so few are yet available in a degraded state. When they are no longer good enough for cars they can be used for household solar storage, for example. In the USA, there are specific collection points for laptop and mobile phone lithium batteries, something that the UK could emulate. We landfill most of ours. One company in the USA intends to take batteries from most EV cars except TESLA – because TESLA apparently intends to recycle their own. They have the technology, but there is not a lot of use for it, yet.
EVs will certainly be more likely to be scrapped after an accident because damage to the battery pack can be hugely expensive. So insurance costs may be higher.
One company in the USA is https://ascendelements.com
In Canada, there is https://www.investcanada.ca/industries/ev-supply-chain
There are plenty of youtube videos showing recycling in action, for example.
https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ
Another leading battery recycling company in the USA is collecting consumer lithium-ion batteries via car dealerships, for example.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com
If ofgem think that charging an ev car is equivalent to about 3/4 of an average house hold daily consumption then they are on cloud cuckoo land .
Five times more like ! Don’t these people read any physics books ?
That’s why they think grid demand is only going to double by 2050
Wake up !
Do you think people spend all day, every day driving around in their cars? Our EV’s range is 200 miles, which is around what we drive in an average week. So our EV’s electricity consumption is 60 kWh (the size of the battery) a week . Our daily electricity consumption in the house (excluding EV charging) is 13.5 kWh/day throughout the year, which is around 95 kWh/week. I would have to drive around 1,600 miles a week (over 80,000 miles a year) for my EV’s consumption to be five times what we consume in the house.
Hi Kathryn, an interesting article that raises a lot of points about bevs – one point you make about the potential difficulties in changing consumer behaviour in terms of when they charge their bevs (whether as soon as they plug it in or via smart charging) and how this is untested.
Whether this change is possible or not, you then later note a comment that consumers would be better driving ICE cars until they fall apart and / or using cars for the shorter part of journeys and using public transport for the majority. To me it seems the chances of consumers smart charging their bevs seems much more likely than the other option of changing decades of consumer behaviour from exchanging their ICE cars every 3-4 years (especially when they can use vehicle leasing schemes that now account for c.90% of new car sales) to running them into the ground, which the industry relies on to get new cars out of the factories / showrooms.
I fully agree that public transport should (where possible) take up the majority of journeys, however again decades of underinvestment have conditioned consumers to view their cars as the lowest cost / most reliable way of getting from A to B (outside London I believe less than 10% of journeys are by public transport).
I think some of the non-technical issues with bevs are more to do with poor / haphazard implementation than an intrinsic inability for them to be a sustainable transport solution, and I think some groups who were always aligned with ICE interests have used this as cover to push back on timescales for phasing out ICE vehicles rather than proposing solutions to problems that often they have contributed to – one of these being the current Westminster govt, or at least very vocal factions within it.
Some of us are old enough to remember people moving house if their job moved 20 miles away and there was no public transport. Today we commute, it is cheap. Now that brings in a question of housing policy, stamp duty etc.which back in the day was less of an issue when you could get to the top of a LA housing list because of a job move.
“Compared to an ICE emitting 150g CO2 per km and travelling 10k km per annum, this equates to a simple CO2 payback of over 13 years. Obviously, CO2 payback times will be lower for counterfactual ICEs of higher emissions and higher mileages, and eVs with smaller battery packs, but the implications are interesting nonetheless”
I am intrigued by this research. Did the fossil fuel CO2 calculation include that in the production of the crude oil, the shipping to the refinery and the refining process and tanker to deliver it to the petrol station. Now I have no detailed knowledge of the costs in terms of energy but it won’t be nothing. And like with coal mining there are other costs in terms of energy security as being played out in Ukraine to some extent, in the case of miners it was the pneumoconiosis and silicosis as well as physical injuries and loss of life.
A similar issue must be counted in with the production and shipping of LNG which I note Canada are trying to produce with Hydro Electricity in their new plant to the north of Vancouver.
And yes I am pro EV and pro heat pump. My replacing an efficient oil boiler has saved 2,400 litres of Kerosene to be replaced by 6,500 kWh of electricity. Much of that consumed overnight at 7.5p a kWh with ufh in a large kitchen acting as a storage heater from March until November. I am disabled hence needed an automatic car. When I tried moderately priced fossil fuel automatics compared to a BEV there was no contest in comfort, the smoothness of the drive being of great benefit, though the potholes this year are proving to be painful. Since going all electric the households electricity consumption has increased about threefold, that is for 6,000 miles a year at 3.7 miles per kWh and domestic use which includes a lot of baking (bread).
The renewal of the Grid is a major issue. Having said that they have admitted that much of the substation equipment is coming to the end of its life. Much of it was built in the 50s and 60s so it has done well. The real problem, is that Scotland appears to be the source of much electricity with close on 30 GW built and in the early planning stages. The Scots will never consume anything like that and so there is a huge issue of getting the surplus from around the SSE and Scottish Power boundary down to the Midlands and further south. Already the East Anglians are playing the NIMBY card it is just unfortunate that London and the South East regions are unlikely to be able to support much more offshore wind farms, the Channel is too busy for that. Rampion will have a new addition but the total output of 1.6GW is trivial in the scheme of things. The proposed Grid line across East Anglia would be able to carry ~7GW to Tilbury and then into North London. The Isle of Grain substations could do with a similar link from the North.
I did come across the average annual consumption of electricity by Local Authority from data from 2020 I think. The total for Scotland was about 26,000 GW and London and the South East more than 75,000 GW. Meters in rural areas often had annual consumptions going on 6,000 kWh, presumably including storage heating whereas the average in outer London was nearer 3,000 kWh. (I hope my figures for the regions is right, I must try to find the spreadsheet again. It was massive!
One final point, there are Teslas in the US which have covered over a million miles. But like triggers brush some have had a new motor or two (if you put so much performance in the motor it just might break) and some have had one or two battery repairs. It will be quite astonishing if the motor industry does come up with a modestly priced vehicle which we can expect to be good for 20 years. Yes there are some quality ICE cars that do last but the maintenance becomes prohibitive.
Sorry to be controversial no malice intended but there has been so much rubbish published about BEVs and their abilities the record of how practical they are needs to be voiced, put straight.
Brian Griffiths :
Where do you get the idea that demand is so low overnight that “CCGT is often close to being switched off with only 3-4 GW being produced to provide kinetic energy to maintain frequency” ?
Downloading the data from Gridwatch I see that for last night the minimum demand at 02:11 hrs was 20 GW with CCGT 7.5 GW, wind 5.7 GW and solar of course zero. And this is for summer, not winter, when demand will be much reduced.
Also, from where please you get the idea that wind can produce the energy required to recharge bevs at night as often the 28 GW of installed wind power can produce less than 1 GW of power? And of course at night, solar is always zero.
So to be certain to be able to recharge bevs at night it will be necessary to run a parallel CCGT system or implement a storage system. The reason why there is as yet no plan for a storage system is because it is ridiculously expensive.
The idea that electricity will be cheaper at night only applies to systems that use CCGT, the transition to renewable energy, because it is totally unreliable, throws this idea out the window. Eelectricity, in theory, will be cheaper simply when the wind decides to blow and the weather allows the sun to shine.
You believe that bevs will be charged overnight. Well, charging our current 38m vehicles with a very basic, low power 7.4 KW charger will require 280 GW or 9 times the current average demand. How will all this power be generated and distributed please?
The NG ESO FES 2035 for 2050 only shows a peak power of 98-114 GW for all electricity use including heat pumps as well as bevs. This is for a predicted reduction in vehicles down to 25m, but even 25m vehicles using a 7.4 KW basic low power charger will require 185 GW and far more than planned.
So there is no way that all bevs will be allowed to be charged overnight, or else the number of bevs will need to be further reduced.
Once enough people switch to using off-peak electricity it won’t be off peak any more.
The point is that many of us EV drivers can choose to charge our cars on nights when little gas is used. Last night is a good example of low wind and a night when many would not charge, particularly as on Saturday some Octopus tariffs were down to 2-4 p a kWh when there was more wind and sunshine..
You are looking forward a few years when 38 million vehicles are likely to run on batteries. When we might find that midday is the new off peak. As I said, I plug my charger into my car and Octopus decides how it will be charged. I set the no. Of miles I need and the charger and Octopus sort it out. It is usually between 23:30 and 05:30 but not necessarily so. Given I and many drivers don’t need to charge more than once a week, my pulling 35 kWh on one night on the yellow phase is not going to cause too much stress on the grid. Some households will have 3 or 4 cars and demand charging every night, but they will be in the minority.
By the time we have all those electric vehicles, steel will be made exclusively using electric hearths and hydrogen, fertilisers will be made from ammonia a product created via electrolysis and bricks and cement will also be made using electricity.. Also at that time I would hope the UK will have nameplate wind farms of some 20% or more of our peak demand and our interconnectors with our friends will swap power back and forth. Note Ireland has plans to build 25 GW of offshore wind, with the super wind resources off the west coast of Ireland they should be able to help bale us out when GB resources are poor.
The poor old ESO is trying to predict when it needs to phase in new Grid reinforcements, who knows when take up of EVs will surge or when heat pumps will become desired by most households. It is a leap of faith for those with poor arithmetic skills to work out when a heat pump is cost effective. In both cases the supply of cars and heat pumps and qualified engineers are a limiting factor.. If heat pumps add to the need to generate electricity from gas it would still be a win situation. If the heat pump achieves a COP of 3.5 or better, an annual head load of 14,000 kWh would require just 4,000 kWh of electricity. Compared to a gas boiler at 90% efficient needing 15,550 kWh plus electricity to run pumps and fans (these are included in COP calculations). Even if all the electricity came from gas only 9,000 kWh of gas would be needed to create that electricity saving about 6,500 kWh of gas.
Of course we need electricity prices to fall, not just to alleviate fuel poverty but to boost industrial competitiveness. That Vattenfall are hesitating over the East Anglian wind farms is not just a pity but a strategic disaster in our need to become more self sufficient in energy.
Hi Kathryn,
I’ve followed and admired your work in many areas of the energy markets for some time. However, I was left somewhat bamboozled reading this latest opinion column in the Telegraph, and your follow-up here, which seems to double down on what I only innocently presume is your own confirmation bias, and not something more nefarious. I honestly thought I was reading something written circa 2010-2013 that had suddenly “gone viral”, not a newly published article in 2023.
While you make some valid points on challenges within your area of expertise in the energy market, these absolutely paled into insignificance by your clear error of judgement on nearly all others. As only one example of many, battery science is moving so fast that what was true only 3 years ago is no longer true today; 50+%, and growing daily, of all new Teslas coming out of the factory today have no cobalt – see https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ev-batteries-lithium-iron-phosphate-narrows-gap-with-nickel-cobalt-2023-06-22/ and https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/common-misconceptions-about-electric-vehicles/common-misconceptions-about-electric-vehicles
I would strongly advise revisiting nearly all the “research” you linked, some of which is over 10 years old, others merely opinions without scientific merit rattling around in the same old echo chambers. As someone with a scientific background, I’m sure you know this better than most, hence why this is so disappointing – but we all let our biases take over at times from fact.
A debate that moves us forward is more than welcomed; that is not this. Your valid points have been buried in a sea of outdated hearsay in an echo chamber of people looking for confirmation of their beliefs, usually held for decades on outdated advice they heard down the pub, are still valid today.
No transport is guilt-free; your shoes, bicycle and train all have emissions (microplastics, metal shavings, brakes and production), but unless we want to take our society back to the middle ages and hobble around barefooted, we need sensible compromise where we can.
EV’s are no silver bullet, but don’t let perfect get in the way of “good enough for now”. EV’s reduce 30+ emissions down to a couple at most. I can talk all day about the pitfalls of technology/tyres within my area of expertise as they relate to EV’s (which is an area of increased focus in itself where research is still early). However, with a standard UK energy mix, some EV’s are now at the point of breakeven in as little as 13.5k miles (and that is 2 years ago), down from 75k+ only a few years before that; they are a compromise worth making ONLY when you would naturally be inclined to replace your vehicle anyway. See https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-do-electric-vehicles-become-cleaner-than-gasoline-cars-2021-06-29/
Bryan
Founder of TyreRunner.com
The standard UK energy mix is a false metric for comparing BEVs and ICEs because it is the CO2 intensity of the incremental demand of the BEV which should be used, not the average mix on the grid. As things stand, an incremental demand will be met by gas in the UK since all of the available zero-CO2 electricity is always fully allocated as renewables are prioritised onto the grid, behind only nuclear.
Using that metric, the typical EV has about the same CO2 per km as a modern 2-litre diesel. Add in the greater manufacturing CO2 and they never match ICE cars, let alone improve on them.
Let’s face it no one really knows how the transition to EVs will work out. If you read the National Grid’s strategy (it isn’t a strategy, it’s a dream) it’s clear even they haven’t a clue. What we do know is that we’re going to have to deliver many times more electricity than we do now and find a way to store most of it and that’s one hell of a challenge. I don’t see the future through the rose-tinted glasses of some of your more optimistic contributors. Kathryn is right to point out the pitfalls and who the winners and losers will be.
Hold on tight because the only certainty is that the transition to net zero is going to be a very bumpy ride.
I won’t repeat the general sentiment of other comentors about the facts here – as they are mostly out of date.
I wanted to point out that the “elephant in the room” is that we are all focusing so hard on EVs that we are forgetting that using a personal vehicle to get around, and designing cities to accommodate the big metal beasts driving, parking and now charging is actually a problem.
John Brown, above, said “15 minute cities, public transport and “active travel”” like it was a problem – when in reality this is what we need to thrive as humans! You only need to look at the thriving people in the “blue zones” to see that active people are healthier, live longer and they eat clean and live clean too – being a part of their community.
Walking, cycling and using PT for longer journeys enables that. It is not about “elites” owning vehicles – but communities owning a few vehicles for the times you want/ need to visit someone that isn’t in your city/ town.
Maybe looking at EVs vs ICE is like looking at “Growth” instead of “Humanity thriving” as the lead indicator of the economic standing of our country?
Should the question be framed more in the how do we make ourselves thrive department, instead of how can I get somewhere faster, in more comfort, and interacting with as few people as possible?
Some people might just be remembering being picked on in school a little to often in their adult lives maybe?
Brian Griffiths :
There’s no way there will be 38m bevs in the UK in a “few years” as you suggest. There will be insufficient energy if we continue with renewables instead of nuclear and the distribution infrastructure could not be built in the time even if it can be afforded. There isn’t even sufficient copper production in the world to build the necessary cabling.
Also, with renewables, when you connect your ev to the grid it is just as likely that the grid will attempt to draw power from the ev battery as charge it.
When the wind isn’t blowing you’ll find it isn’t blowing over the whole of northern Europe. So Ireland’s offshore wind will not help us. Remember that we already have wind farms from northern Scotland to the south coast of England and some days the 28 GW of installed (nameplate) power is incapable of providing even 1 GW.
The reason why Vattenfall have pulled out of their AR4 “contract” is because the wheels are already coming off the wind bus with wind farms now wanting CfD prices multiplied by two and half times :
A Renewables UK press release dated 04/07/2023 says that they and two other renewable energy associations have written a joint letter to DESNZ/the Government urging them to make changes to their next annual CfD clean power auction.
Among other requests is that “the budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind alone would need to be at least two and a half times higher than its current level to maximise the capacity which could now be secured in this year’s auction.”
Heat pumps only have a COP of 3.5 when the outside air temperature is 12 degrees C. They drop to 2.5 at zero when resistive heating is then required to defrost the ice on the outside unit. The outside unit is very impractical. It is noisy, needs snow to be cleared from it (so not useful for the elderly or infirm) and is easily stolen. The output water temperature is so low that larger radiators, as well as high levels of insulation are required. Plus resistive heating for the hot water to prevent legionnaires’ disease.
Even the CEO of the CCC does not yet have a heat pump installed in his flat.
John
I was quoting or mis quoting another post on the no. Of vehicles. I suspect that the no. Of vehicles will fall overall. Many youngsters aren’t driving and living in flats in city centres is helping reduce the need. Similarly, HGV traffic appears to be reducing. Railfreight as I point out somewhere above is growing. Southampton has modified the track layout in the dock area to allow train capacity to rise. Same number of trains, 40% more containers can be carried. Covid has added a significant number of paths for freight across the country. Possibly the best easy example is the Tesco trains to Scotland from Northampton. First stop Mossend Glasgow and then Inverness. The roads can’t compete with the speed and bulk carried. Electrified to Glasgow and onwards to Inverness in the planning. To be continued.
Brian Griffiths :
For bulk transport, horse & carts were replaced by canals which were then replaced by rail which was in turn replaced by road & trucks.
Not only are trucks collecting from and delivering to multiple door-to-door addresses along a route more convenient and flexible the newer technology of rubber wheels on a tarmac road is far cheaper to build and maintain than the 18th century technology of steel wheels on a steel track.
The final nail in the rail freight coffin will be driverless trucks, a feature the railways could introduce earlier but seem unwilling to do.