New battery for electric vehicle

[Workingman]

Nice avoidance of the environmental damage battery production and disposal or recycling causes, but it's not on your doorstep so like all the emissions it is not a problem. Out of sight out of mind.

I see you like numbers, reams of them, so here are some simple ones for you:

Fuel tax is 57.95p/l + 20VAT on the top price - a tax on a tax - roughly 66% in total or about 79p/l. Annually about 77bn litres are used for transport bringing in approximately £61bn.

EVs pay no VED but 'normal' cars bring in about £37.7bn for the treasury - all that goes as well.

200,000 charge points, a drop in the ocean for the number of vehicles, will cost the country in the region of £200mn to install. Another cost to us all.

Simple question: How are those annual losses and one off costs to be covered?

I am betting on a few ways. The first is a hike on the price of every unit of electricity regardless of whether it is for driving or heating a home or cooking food. That will not be a vote winner any time soon. Another is Cromwell's price per mile / track and trace, with all the connotations they have for personal liberty. They will go down well in a country that baulks at a simple photo ID card. Then there is VED on EVs, and that could be quite a lot....

EV owners who are currently living the good life on the backs of everyone else are going to find that the cost of running an EV will rise substantially once the La la land version of the raft of subsidies ends.

I am not against EVs, by any means, but I am against all the efforts being put in to a) talk them up as the be all and end all, and b) the refusal to accept that there might be other alternatives or to explain them away as nonsense. I fully expect that in the fullness of time we will have all sorts of alternatives in a similar way that we have petrol and diesel today. And, yes, hydrogen will be one of them.

[cromwell]

Have you looked at the new taxation on what they call "luxury" vehicles and also the 2-6 year taxes on a new vehicle? The replacement for my MPV, because it is top of the range, goes from around £300 to over £800 for the first year and in years 2-6 it is £1,300 per year, returning to over £800 in year 7.

The rules changed in 2016 and people who buy expensive hybrids which go over 40k or a battery EV, which easily go over £40k, are being caught out with this new "luxury vehicle" tax. It is based on RRP and not the discounted dealer price.

That seems a bit nuts, if they want people to buy new cars (of which EV's will be some). Slapping a huge tax on a new car means that only companies will be buying them!

[Suff]

Well the EV's are 0 tax but the 2-6 year add on fee means that unless you are buying an EV under 40k, you wind up paying tax of several hundred a year.

What this does is hammer FF vehicle tax even more. So my diesel MPV suddenly becomes astronomical because they want tax from EV's without "taxing" them.

Today there are not many EV's which come in under £40k and £40k is the threshold for the additional taxes. What it has done is taken any kind of larger non EV stratospheric in taxes, especially if it comes in over £40k.

[Suff]

Talking about batteries and grid, reality is a harsh taskmaster.

Current UK average demand, daily, is 820GW/h of energy
Max sustained power delivery, daily, is 1008GW/h
Peak power output, if sustained, is 1128GW/h

We have 32m personal vehicles in the UK. Let us assume that

a) they have a battery the average size of modern battery EV's of 57kw/h
b) that they do drive the average requisite 20 miles per day as shown in the stats

Firstly that is 1,824GW/h of power stored in these batteries. A very large buffer for the grid.
Secondly, with the average mileage of 20 miles divided by the average 3.5 miles per kw/h, we would need to generate 192GW/h extra per day to support normal daily driving.

The difference between 1008 and 820 is 188. Leaving us 4GW/h to find in order to supply the needs of every personal vehicle in the country.

However we are forgetting the max value. Well we can't use the max all day every day, but we don't need to. We just need to peak for the extra 4GW/h.

OK I've ignored the 4.2 million light goods vehicles (vans mainly) and the 480k heavy goods vehicles. For brevity.

So, you see, when you crunch the numbers, we don't need a battery which sucks the grid dry in 5 minutes for normal people. We need charging infrastructure. LOTS of it. Very Soon.

Also we need sensible people who talk about power balance, our new Nuclear power stations, better buffered wind. Grid scale batteries that balance the renewables and other storage technologies (super compressed air perhaps).

The future has arrived. As usual, we're not ready.