Rather than have guessing games among Americans as to what the situation
in the UK is, just ask the Brits direct!



On Sat, 15 Jun 2019 13:05:26 -0700, Rick C wrote:

I'm being told EV charging will be a lot more difficult in the UK than
it is here in the US.

I looked at the typical daily cycle and they have some 10 to 20 GW
between the peak and minimum each day with resonably flat consumption in
the trough. That will allow off peak charging of a third of the 30
million vehicles for 50 miles.

But I'm being told there are two problems with that. One is that
distribution is sized for an average of 2 kW consumption per household
in many older areas (which they seem to have a lot of). This clearly
makes it hard to charge EVs overnight at just 3 kW which otherwise would
be fine for a typical user. In this case it would require replacement
of a lot of distribution cabling.

The other is that many individual homes are on PME circuits where no
separate ground is provided to the home, only the neutral. This neutral
is bonded to water pipes and any other exposed metal that could be
grounded my any means, like an old radiator heating system. This is
considered safe since even if the neutral to the home opened there would
be no shock hazard since there is no ground to make contact with as the
grounds in the house are all at neutral voltage. This does make it hard
to use electricity outside where you could contact a true earth ground
and suffer electrocution with any grounded appliance. To mitigate this
a ground rod at the house is required which in many cases is
prohibitively expensive to install with an adequately conductive path.

So are these two problems being presented realistically?

I'm also being told it will be a huge problem to provide enough charging
capability for the many potential EV owners who park on the street or in
public facilities. I expect it is practical to install curb side and
parking lot outlets with some outlay which is small, in fact tiny
compared to the cost of a car. But I kinda have to take them at their
word for that one.

Rick C.





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