Electric Vehicles and the Rail Network

Train operators pay more for electricity. Some of the freight companies have switched to diesel even on electrified routes because it’s now significantly cheaper.

The government really need to sort out the price of electricity, the wholesale market is totally dysfunctional because it was never designed for renwable energy.

Less than that David..I pay 15p per Kwh overnight charging and my car goes 4 miles per KWh.

David according to the DVLA 16% (2022) of new registrations were for BEVs. People are voting with their feet and sticking with Petrol (50%) or some form of Hybrid. Batteries are currently a work in progress & a hive of activity. Peoples reticence will evaporate if we have a full charge taking us 500-1000 miles and/or charging taking 5-10 minutes and/or they are make of relatively cheap stable locally sourced substances. Sure there are BEVs which can service some of the market but we need it to function in the real world for everyone.

So my diesel car does 45 mpg. It has 60,000 miles on the clock and has a value of about £5k, I do about 5000 a year of mixed motoring. At this rate I expect it to last me out, I am a pensioner. To buy a new EV car would cost me the rest of my pension lump sum. Alternatively I have seen a nice Morris Minor Estate with renewed ash frame for £10k. No road tax, no microchips, 40mpg. What do you advise?

Problem is UK needs to be able to generate 600Twh of energy reliably per year once everything switches to electricity. Which means we more likely need 800Twh of generation capacity as renewables can’t work all the time and when it does we need excess energy to charge storage. That storage needs to be huge, considering on Tesla battery is only 75kwh you can do the maths on how many batteries you’ll need for just 1Twh of storage. You need shift that power around the UK has renewable won’t supply even power (wind blowing up north nut not down south) so we need much more grid infrastructure. The reality is today cost for renewable electricity doesn’t include the investment and maintenance required for all the new energy infrastructure that’s needed. Whilst it may still be cheaper the costs are not being fully exposed to the public, not clearly anyway, Labour is saying they will invest 28b per year so there’s an indication of what’s required, that doesn’t include private investment, charging or railway or cost for industry to switching.

Fuel duty then vat means fuel in the UK is 62p/l so without tax I can fill up and do over 600 miles for £45, if I add the equivalent 8% tax on fuel as on electricity I pay £48.6.

Electric cars are 30% heavier and therefore damage roads more so likely hood is once ICE engines are gone tax on electric vehicles will need to reflect the addition maintenance needed to roads. They wear tire more also = more cost and more old tires. Electric trucks are likely to be 2X heavier than ICE trucks so haulage weights will need to drop = more trips. Again we need to remove carbon but lets not pretend its all roses and super cheap.

The technology is not yet mature enough! Clearly it works for you but far from most other people. Both generating capacity and grid infrastructure needs to be matured and expanded, and not least far more public charging points are needed. One factor that EVs do not address is how to charge something in an emergency away from the grid. Sorry we can’t send an ambulance, police, or fire engine as they all need a charge to work. How about fire engine water pumps and many more issues, like standby generators. And what happens when there is a power cut, no transport, no heating, no cooking, no light? The energy density (capacity) of batteries is woefully inadequate compared to any liquid fuel, never mind the practical issues of getting huge amounts of electrical energy into the battery in the first place, the re-cycling and rare elements needed. EVs are great in their niche but on a wide scale universal basis not yet, and probably never. Compare the number of fossil fuel pumps and the refuelling throughput, 5 minutes for 700kwH of energy, per pump, per vehicle! On a simplistic basis one fossil fuel pump can handle a dozen cars an hour. EVs are a great idea but really not yet practical for wholescale national use.

OK I am sold on it, what sort of electric car do you have

I drive hybrids (at the moment) and have done for over 15 years. You are proving my point a little. Battery technology is improving day by day however the research that is going on is mindblowing. Nobody is going “that’s it – best we can do” – they are saying “we have only just started”. As I suggested in my view the tech is not yet mature. Any new car should last on average 9-10 years. Much can happen in that timeframe.

This does assume you have some were off road to charge it. for large numbers of the UK who live in a terraced street, that is a problem

I am fully sold on the benefits of Electric Cars Jonathan. But my issue is with residual value for owners. As you approach that 8 year battery life guarantee point i expect the second hand value to nosedive. Who wants to buy a car and then pay the same again to replace the batteries?

BTW i expect my next company car to be an EV and we have also just purchased a 125cc equivalent EV moped for zipping around town.

Solid state batteries are the way forward because they offer at least double the range and half the charging time. Toyota, VW, GM and Ford are close to starting manufacture

Thanks for highlighting this. I believe the Chinese are producing EV cars which you ‘recharge’ by stopping at the garage and swapping out the dud battery for a fully charged one. Bit like Calor has bottles.

Agree, some think this is a very easy problem just stick in a few chargers add some wind turbines and it job done. Its a massively complex task. Forecast are that electricity consumption will double before 2050 as it replaces fossil fuels. We simple don’t have anywhere near the infrastructure to deal with moving that amount of power to right places.

Diesel generators to charge green EVs….you couldnt make it up …fantastic/pathetic (delete on your appreciation of irony)

its not just the charging at stations either.
Currently home charging works, due to not many owners on the same street.
But the cable that supplies the leccy to your house is shared with upto 100 other people, and is designed for an average of 2-3kw use across them.
then we get to car chargers 7kw, solar batterys and heat pumps.
these will all charge run overnight on “cheap” electricity.
But at some point when enough people have a charger you will hit the limit for the cable.
This will if you are lucky cause the protection on your local substation to trip the vacuum circuit breaker.
So no electricity to all the houses, re-making a circuit breaker onto a fault condition is a No No, so somewhen will need to inspect.
then the electricty can be restored.
if it does not trip, your cable will fail, thus requiring the damaged area to be found ,dug up and repaired. days?
they just need to replace all the cables to pretty much every house to allow for this, btw thats not national grid, its your local electricity company.
oh and the generation capacity as well, national grid also dont build power stations.

As for battery failure, they will last longer than the cars life..at present they are working on 15-20 life and 200,000 miles…Kia even guarantee for the first 10 years and 100,000 miles…..re home charging that’s where the work needs to be…if you live in a flat you need a designated parking space with a home charger, I’d you live in a terrace the laws need to be changed so you can have a designated spot built outside your house with a home charger….it just takes will.

Hi Dern, this is a strategy which has been aggressively pushed for decades with limited success. Those in London or any other large metropolis will look out of their windows and see many buses, underground stations and bikes but also vast quantities of cars & vans. Running modern life requires cars & vans however much we would wish it otherwise. In the countryside where the weekly (and empty) bus only comes on a Tuesday you can speak to any driver and understand the necessity of their journey or the fact that they are free human beings and they will enjoy themselves as they please. If you extend that to other poorer countries people have made it in life if they have the freedom of a car. They do not care how it is powered.

Exactly, people are too focused on engine emissions and forget that all vehicles put brake dust and tyre particulates into the environment. As you said private transport is never really green.

It really should have and it’s a crime that we aren’t, but then the current government seems happy to invest billions into roads, while cutting rail investment at every opportunity.

For Trains? Diesel is inefficent and polluting in general, remember that trains have to go into population centers, and living near a diesel line compared to a electic rail line has proven health risks.
But the other thing is that even Diesel trains are actually electric, the vast majority have big electric engines driving the wheels, they just generate the electricity with big, heavy, diesel engines. Having electric trains just means you can still generate power by diesel, but do so more efficently in a power station, and not require your trains to lug great big diesel generator sets with them.

(Equally, if everything is relying on electricity you can still use bio diesel and hydrogen to generate it, same principle as above; electricity is generator fuel agnostic).

not sure thats viable I would assume many routes have bridges that would stop double deck trains – and rectifying that would be a huge undertaking be easier to have longer trains surely?

Uk Railways have a very restrictive Loading Gauge, Double Decker Trains make sense but few routes would be able to use them.

So in summary they are not the panacea many would have us believe and do indeed have an impact on the environment.
There will be other manifold impacts of the headlong rush for EV cars etc that are not yet known or fully understood.
For freight (trains & lorries, buses etc) it may be a viable solution but there are many studies even in that area that have concluded deisel is still a prefered solution when all things are considered.
Nonwithstanding the conflated arguements around the real environmental benefit of EV cars in particular the public neither want nor can afford to go electric at this time.
The drive (no pun intended) for a ubiquitous EV public vehicle setup is at best misgiuided- at worst I see another deiselgate on the horizon.

I think the West generally would get far more from EV if we went back to a non throw away culture. My father was extremely well paid in goverment however he bought a car and as long as it was reliable he kept it as long as possible. I do the same with mine at 9 years and counting. Surely this would be when EV comes into its own as the pollution manufacturing costs are paid and the longer you keep it the more enviromentally friendly it really is.
Do we all need a new car every 2/3 years??

George whilst true. We are ignoring other advances in technology. As you quote

as technological advancements continue, the efficiency of these batteries and the methods for producing them will likely improve.

It seems biased to say EV problems will be solved with technology then completely overlook carbon capture, hydrogen (JCBs hydrogen engine) which if given the chance could flourish rather than regulating them out of existence. Do we wait 10-15 years to see how EVs and battery tech plays out before considering anything else?

https://www.jcb.com/en-gb/campaigns/hydrogen

Will you be mentioning the amount of electrical energy that will be required for the entire country to function once trains, industry, cars, houses etc all rely on it? How much storage we will need, how much redundancy needs to be built in, how much investment is needed in the grid. Even are we all able to travel on a bank holiday Friday or will their be restriction because we simply can’t charge the number of vehicles that hit the road and we’re not going invest in massive charging over capacity for a blip 5 times a year.

Also no mention of unpopular tech like self drive cars which could improve efficiency of all vehicles by eliminating stop starting and smoothing traffic. reducing need to recharge but also reduce the appeal of trains if I can go door to door with a guaranteed journey time. We can’t advocate that technology will solve EV challenges without acknowledging technology will ultimately be able to drive a car, it should be up there with battery tech to improve range arguably higher as it reduce tire wear and brake wear which creates pollutants tbh.

On rare earths yes its in the ICE supply chain but unlike EV you can produce the fuel and and the ICE can run in a basic form without the need to rare earths. The security debate has various levels but ultimately should be peeled back to how would we function in a constrained world (war time) and which technologies would allow us function even in a basic form. Any rare earths sourced would be best used in a defence manufacturing capacity imo. China understands the environmental impacts of pollution from cars and benefits of EV but it also knows wars are ultimately won by out producing your enemy. Controlling supply and having manufacturing scale is a strategic military advantage. Its therefore no surprise its already woven itself into the global supply chain for EVs and renewables in general. It can also undercut EU and US manufacturers of EVs retaining a hold on global supply chains.

Britain during WW2 was able switch production lines from cars to tanks very successfully, in the very near future even if we can get rare earths and other materials its going to be a stretch to produce effect battery powered military equipment that will leave us with the challenge switching electric vehicle production to ICE military vehicles and equipment. In this respect hydrogen ICE look more secure as it will be easier to revert to production fossil or bio fuels. And as we refine and produce less fuel it will become an increasing niche and expensive product, how does this impact our military budget? So does this drive to electrification really offer security, in some aspects yes in others no.

And whilst the like EV batteries shoulder some responsibility for the exploitive practices in mining materials like cobalt, that is a choice when we have other potential technologies that could reduce carbon emissions that we are either pursuing less vigorously, not incentivising or regulating out of existence. The scale of EV and grid storage batteries will is many time more than smaller power density devices like phones. An iphone is around 12wh where as a Tesla model S battery is 98000wh so that around 8100 iphones per car. There’s 850,000 EVs in the UK. 8,100*850,000 = 6,885,000,000 iphones. OK they’re not all Teslas so lets say a round 5 billion iphones (which is one of he more powerful devices). For comparison there’s roughly 16b mobile devices in the world today. We need 33 million EVs to replace the current number of cars. Before we get to 3m cars in the UK we will have surpassed all the mobile devices on the planet. Then there’s grid storage and any other EV vehicle like vans or trucks. So the share of those exploitive practices is going to fall largely on EVs and grid storage. So lets hope that there is some technological breakthrough that reduces the necessity for these materials. But any battery revolution will certainly filter into phones etc so EVs will always make up the largest share of what ever process and materials that are used by a considerable margin.

Yes. fossil fuels are sourced from authoritarian regimes and there exploitation in that industry also so there’s no argument for the status quo, but its equally important to recognise the negatives of EV batteries. After all the one of the biggest criticisms of big oil is it not transparent.

Every sane person with an IQ of 2 or more knows we should be removing carbon from our lives, but we need honesty on the security, honesty on the alternatives, honesty on the impact our lives and honesty on the costs.

If EVs are promising but not quite there yet surely we should be focusing on solutions we can practice right now?

Better public and active travel infrastructure in cities can allow most people to get rid of their cars entirely today, bringing a host of benefits such as:
a) more space for traffic now that 99% of road users aren’t dragging a small living room with them
b) more profitable city centers as people can go to town, without getting stuck in traffic or waiting to cross the high street at some lights, instead of buying online
c) people actually go outside, get exercise and interact with strangers instead of being permanently isolated in their social media and friend group bubble.

😃 see this is debate , this is good , we might disagree however as with most things in life their are two sides……

to clarify for the hoose I was referring to the relentless information push proclaiming electric vehicles as being ‘environmentally friendly’” is untrue and is in-fact propaganda.

As the official narrative is pushed in such a way that people would believe there is no environmental damage or negative downside to anything associated with electric vehicles and that they are completely environmentally friendly.which if people did some research as I have done would discover is simply not true.

to describe the downsides as “Challenges” in my opinion diminishes and downplays the reality of what is occurring. I’m Just looking for some honesty on this important issue but I appreciate your response at least acknowledging what I’m saying as I likewise acknowledge your points.

That said it’s my job to lob metaphorical hand grenades into the mix.😝

Cheers

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J

i don’t think we are ever gonna be on the same page on this but hey . The idea cars kill you is the same crazy train thinking as the earth is flat ( c’mon man you guys know who you are in here😉😂)

combustion engines in modern cars have never been so efficient and clean as they are now this is indisputable So pollution from them can only diminish.

Air quality in London for example is well within acceptable limits. PM2.5 concentration currently meets those freedom loving we’re only looking out for you WHO’s annual air quality guide. The London boys crew from here should be cockatoop!.

Can I ask where do you think all these EV batteries are going to end up ?. They are gonna end up in landfill poisoning the environment the green zealot brigade claim to care so much about.

Being a Tesla man you’ll know. batteries differ widely in chemistry and construction which makes it a real ball ache to create efficient recycling systems. The cells are held together with tough glues that are extremely difficult to take apart. Tesla cells for example are unique not only for their cylindrical shape but also for the nigh on indestructible polyurethane cement that holds them together This is an economic obstacle and only 1 issue of which there are many that relates to this topic. Maybe one day they’ll get to a place where 99 problems but the battery ain’t one👍🏻 But I doubt it.

The bottom line is the road to net zero is going to take us backwards not to the future bro but to a place more akin to the 18th century.

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Nicely put 👍

Indeed

Renewable electricity last winter displaced more than a third of the UK’s entire annual gas demand for power generation, the equivalent of 95TWh of gas – equal to 110 tankers of LNG, saving us £billions in import costs. In 2022, UK renewables provided 38 per cent of the country’s electricity generation, nearly as much as gas (at 40 per cent) and we became a NET ELECTRICITY EXPORTER for the first time since 2010. Over 1.5 million people are now working in the UK green economy.

Sunak, Hunt and Schraps are heavily influenced by the fosiil fuel lobby. And Liz Truss was a a commercial manager at Shell

George, I am absolutely not criticizing your site or even your article( though I obviously disagree with its advocacy on this occasion) The hype I referred to was that coming from those with a financial interest in pushing net zero. From Lord( why? ) Deben to air miles Kerry to the CEO of Ford UK, their arguments are tainted by financial self interest.
I do not accept the so called settled science of AGW. The way that its adherents try to stifle sceptical views rather than disprove them and the absurd misuse of evidence by the IPCC( global boiling Gutierrez leading the way)are attributes of a quasi religious cult rather than dispassionate, constantly self critical science.
But- I am old enough to remember forecasts of the world running out of oil by 2000. It hasn’t but one day it will. Planning for that in the long term makes sense. Renewables will be part of the alternative ( hydro being the most reliable). But without nuclear to provide baseload 24/7/52 modern energy demands cannot be met.
Accepting for arguments sake that rising CO2 is manmade and potentially harmful, there is no reason why the UK should rush ahead. CO2 emissions have fallen by over 40% since 1990, one of the biggest drops in any major economy. Our emissions per capita are now lower than China’s and only slightly above France, which generates 70% of its electricity by nuclear. So we can reasonably act cautiously whilst calling on others to do far more. The big emitters almost certainly won’t so whatever the UK does will make no difference to the global picture.
Sorry for the length of my reply.

Agree

But you would, in practice, have a sub main (separate modern fuse board) directly off the meter to charge an EV anyway.

That way the existing electrics won’t be touched.

TBH if you have original 1950’s electrics with fuses you are overdue an upgrade for safety reasons alone.

You can use a public charger in your local supermarket or garage or motorway service centre

I am one of those people who doubt that BEVs are the best solution going forward, it does not mean I am right-wing, implying so is a horribly cynical way to try and shut down the debate here.

Neither am I anti-renewable, I am, however, concerned we are currently not choosing the best solutions

My reasoning does not come from political debate, but I am more interested in articles that discuss technical, infrastructure, and long-term solutions to our transport problems.

We still very much rely on Diesel engines to haul long-distance and bulk freight via rail, sea, and road, I do not see battery power replacing truck, ship, or MBT engines, whereas hydrogen-powered ICEs could.