This article in the Daily Mail starkly illustrates the real-life problems facing electric car owners now that numbers are increasing on the road.
Service stations with only a handful of chargers, where electric car owners have to queue to charge, broken chargers not allowing owners to charge; basically the charging infrastructure not keeping up with demand.
Even the best charging network, provided by Tesla has had issues over the holiday period, with Tesla owners having to queue to use chargers.
There's a reason that the number of chargers is low: the electricity supply to (usually isolated) service stations is limited. Only a certain number of chargers can be supported before new electricity supply cables have to be laid to the service station to supply the amount of current demanded by more chargers.
That then becomes prohibitively expensive. Tesla get round the issue by current-sharing. If one car hooks up to a charger, then you can usually supercharge fine. If two cars hook up to the same charging plinth, then the current to each car is reduced so the overall demand on the grid supply is shared and kept below the limit of the supply cables.
That's why you find (or should find) more chargers in service stations in urban areas. The grid in built up areas should be able to cope with the demand without too much hassle.
But this is yet more evidence that the push to electric is ideological. Had the push to electric been anything else, then the implications of a million electric vehicles on the road would have been investigated and the correct policies put in place to provide adequate charging infrastructure.
As it is, government policy is to set an end date for fossil-fuelled vehicles and then let the market sort out the infrastructure.
It's not good enough. The National Grid needs to be modified, planning laws need to be amended and so much more secondary changes need to be made to support electric vehicles, if they are to become a success.
The issue of grid supply to service stations is just one. Others are supplying charging infrastructure in historic preservation areas where there are planning restrictions. For instance how does one get permission to bolt a charger onto the wall of a listed building? How do you install on-street charging in preservation areas? In both instances how do you modify planning laws to allow it, or do you make preservation areas and historic buildings charge-free zones?
Even when the charging infrastructure starts to get better, it needs to be able to support electric cars in winter with vastly reduced range. Electric car drivers are now beginning to realise that battery range can be as much as halved in very cold weather. Meaning that drivers are forced to hook up to chargers more often and create more demand for chargers in winter. I doubt very much the charging infrastructure has even considered this effect. Instead just plonking chargers willy-nilly wherever they can be shoehorned in and grid capacity will allow. No consideration for range, no consideration for demand. Instead the market provides the solution for the cheapest cost, ensuring maximum profits.
No-one has yet cottoned onto the brand loyalty that could be gained by providing adequate numbers of reliable chargers for all, similar to the Tesla network, but without the limitations of having to own a Tesla. Of course the hurdles to this are many, with the risk of competitors undercutting you and providing just enough charging capacity at a lower cost. Although it appears that Tesla have now opened up their network to those who are able to use it.
Over the past month I've been posting articles about the wider issue: that of the means used to generate the electricity we use. Even if we went all-electric tomorrow, the issue still remains that the bulk of our generating capacity is provided by gas-powered stations. Renewables are okay when the wind and solar are available, but when they are not (which is most of the time) gas has to come on stream to provide the shortfall.
So at the moment electric cars are not as green as the hype suggests. They are still powered mostly by fossil fuels. It's just that you don't see any emissions from the car. They are moved away from the car to the power station. Just like industry has been closed in the UK and moved to India or China. We still require the materials, it's just that their manufacture (and therefore the emissions created by making the item) have been moved elsewhere.
We are far from Green, far from net-zero, far from the ideological perfection the disciples of Greta Thunberg demand.
That's what you get if you blindly follow an ideology, a requirement, a target, without a plan or a convincing end-game, without thinking it through.
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