Britain’s biggest motorway service station provider has brought in marshals to police “charge rage” among electric vehicle drivers battling for access to plug-in points.
Moto chief executive Ken McMeikan warned the UK’s motorway service stations are facing growing “public disorder” due to a lack of grid connections preventing him from installing enough car chargers to meet the surge in demand.
Tsk. And going green is going to be so simple and cheap, isn’t it?
Hope he’s charging extra for providing the security.
Pioneering motorists used to carry jerry cans of petrol mounted on the sides of their vehicles in order to ensure that they had enough fuel to get where they were going. Maybe EV owners could do that and keep a genny in the boot. I don’t believe that the filling stations that sprang up to keep those early motorist supplied needed government subsidies to get up and running.
Just keep a spare battery in the boot.
Only weighs 1000 lbs.
All those rows of charge points need a 11kV feed to a big green transformer/rectifier box. In most cases that will be underground so lots of trench digging to the 33kV substation. Of course that in turn will need augmenting in many cases so more feeds required from the 132kV substation. I think UK Power Networks and the other regional distribution companies have lots more work than they expected this early.
It’s been a problem for a while too. Those lovely Tesla charge points at Fleet Services Westbound had/have been out of use for years ever since they were installed because the local grid can’t supply the load.
“Charge rage”? Oh, I can imagine!
Perhaps they should consider putting up some cameras with a live feed to a youtube channel? Psychologists would then be more pertinent.
It would be a very valuable teaching resource for students of psychology or those interested in various negative personality traits: narcissism, entitlement, jesus/god complex, arrogance, thoughtlessness etc.
And yet again what all the damned fools on blogs like this this said would happen has come to pass.
This WAS one of the reasons people switched from electric to petrol powered cars a century or so ago.
Can you just stick a portable generator in the boot and run the car off that? Let’s crunch some numbers.
A portable 3.2 kW generator will cost you as little as £500. (Anything bigger won’t fit in the boot.) A typical EV uses 250 Wh per mile. That means you can’t drive faster than 12.8mph with that generator (3.2 / 0.25).
“Electric car drivers were forced to queue for up to six hours at some service stations across the UK last Christmas.”
Sounds bad. Does Mr McMeikan have a solution?
The lack of action has forced Moto to seek planning permission for up to 25 solar farms next to its service stations to “guarantee an amount of power that we require for EV drivers,” Mr McMeikan said.”
Yes. Solar panels. That’s the answer to a shortage of power at the end of December.
Do EV owners honestly believe it’s possible to drive around a country as far north as the UK powered by sunbeams?
Do EV owners honestly believe it’s possible to drive around a country as far north as the UK powered by sunbeams?
Perhaps they should keep loads of cucumbers in the boot instead of a spare battery.
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that a future generation will be asking “Electric cars? What were they?” for exactly the same reasons ours did. Battery tech has again bumped up against the unevadable laws of chemistry & physics. The limits of the power density of batteries. Designing a vehicle around half a ton or more of deadweight to produce a usable range produces an unviable vehicle. If you must go Net Zero you synthesise an oxidisable fuel using renawables (or nuke) & use it a device converts it to energy. The ways of doing that are simpler & more efficient tech & already exist. As does the distribution networks. Sense may eventually prevail
But it is enormously entertaining watching trillions being wasted on going up a dead end street.
( A similar comment was made on another thread – now for some reason not page page loading. So you get the dubious pleasure of reading it twice)
It’s interesting watching the direction spaceflight’s going for exactly the same reason. Looks like the SCRAMJET will soon be reality. What’s the advantage? An aerodynamic air breather gets you half way to orbital velocity & above the denser part of the atmosphere without needing several hundred tons of first stage, much of which is LOX. From there, the extra delta V to orbit’s a piece of piss. The rocket first stage expends energy lifting the oxygen it burns. SCRAMJET gets it free from the atmosphere.
Similar with electric vehicles. They have to drag the entirety of their “fuel” around with them. ICE’s get half of theirs free.
“But it is enormously entertaining watching trillions being wasted on going up a dead end street.”
Generally speaking you do need government interference to make this happen. Tech that is unviable tends to be choked at birth without public funding. People tend to be more sceptical about putting their own money into such experiments. Blowing other people’s money on pie in the sky projects isn’t really a problem at all.
Like electric cars first time round? We kept fork lifts* & milk floats because they were economic applications.
*Of course site forklifts are often LPG/ICE. Because the duty cycle doesn’t suit recharging.
Perhaps they should keep loads of cucumbers in the boot
Potatoes or lemons and a bunch of copper and zinc electrodes (and a lot of copper wire) would be a better proposition.
Yeah BiS. We could use nukes to produce hydrocarbon fuels, or even ammonia, to drive ICE’s. We could even conserve uranium resources by buying sodium cooled breeder reactors from Putin.
Of course the Greens’d all die of terror. Which would be another benefit.
We need an internet entrepreneur to set up a “charge in my drive” service. This would mirror the current “park in my drive” service which matches long distance travellers to individual domestic parking spaces (sometimes double if a double drive).
Is there any government ban or restriction which would prevent such a service from being created?
The charge in my drive service could include add-ons such as a cup of tea, a biscuit, a nap on the couch, and a little walking tour of the locale for a suitably agreed price. Until your car is charged and off you go again.
Charging in your (domestic) drive is limited to 16kW (maybe 8kW for older housing), so 6+ hours to recharge an ’empty’ 90kWh battery. Tesla superchargers can run up to 250kW.
Just looking at my fusebox.
I could run a charger off of my ( unused ) cooker fuse, that would give me 9,600 kW. Otherwise I’d have to bundle the supply and not be able to make a cup of tea downstairs.
It’d all get a bit warm in the cupboard under the stairs though wouldn’t it ?
@Bongo
That may well breach most service contracts for domestic electricity & a few laws. It isn’t permitted to run a supply across a property’s boundary, so you can’t legally supply your neigbour’s electricity from yours. (I believe the same applies to water & gas) Effectively you’re making yourself a service supplier which would require a different contract, a licence & compliance with a mass of regulations. And I wouldn’t be surprised if charging a car that’s someone else’s property might fall foul of that One can see there’d be all sorts of incentives for both electricity suppliers* & various state interests to interpret it that way.
*The capacity of your cabling in & the whole street’s for that matter was installed with the anticipation of “normal usage” demands. Charging other people’s cars would be in excess of “normal usage”. ( Actually, charging your own car is in excess of “normal usage”. The cables were laid long before charging electric cars was envisaged. So far, because market penetration’s been relatively small, this hasn’t yet become an issue. It’s going to become one. Widespread domestic car recharging would require upgrading all the street cabling from the local grid transformer right the way to the houses. It was never designed for it. As was not the entirety of the national trunk grid.)
@BiS
*The capacity of your cabling in & the whole street’s for that matter was installed with the anticipation of “normal usage” demands. Charging other people’s cars would be in excess of “normal usage”. ( Actually, charging your own car is in excess of “normal usage”. The cables were laid long before charging electric cars was envisaged. So far, because market penetration’s been relatively small, this hasn’t yet become an issue. It’s going to become one. Widespread domestic car recharging would require upgrading all the street cabling from the local grid transformer right the way to the houses. It was never designed for it. As was not the entirety of the national trunk grid.)
Spot on. Of course, we’ll never have to test it, because we don’t and won’t have the generating capacity to supply a nation with 30 million EVs. And that’s before we get to all the heat pumps and electrification of other modes of transport. Nonsense on stilts doesn’t begin to describe the fantasy world of Nut Zero.