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UK Wants An Electric-Vehicle Charger In Every New Home (thedrive.com)
A new government proposal included in Road to Zero, a report on climate-change related policies, would require all new homes to be fitted with electric car charging points. It follows a commitment made last year by the UK to end sales of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2040. The Drive reports: "It is our intention that all new homes, where appropriate, should have a charge point available," a government statement said. "We plan to consult as soon as possible on introducing a requirement for charge point infrastructure for new dwellings in England."
To help achieve that goal, the U.K. will reportedly establish a 400-million-pound ($531 million) fund for companies that manufacture and install charging stations. The government is also reportedly looking at integrating charging stations with newly-installed streetlights, as well as wireless-charging technology. A new Automated and Electric Vehicles bill will also give the government power to mandate installation of charging infrastructure at highway service stations.
To help achieve that goal, the U.K. will reportedly establish a 400-million-pound ($531 million) fund for companies that manufacture and install charging stations. The government is also reportedly looking at integrating charging stations with newly-installed streetlights, as well as wireless-charging technology. A new Automated and Electric Vehicles bill will also give the government power to mandate installation of charging infrastructure at highway service stations.
This sounds like one of those situations where they install charging stations all over the place, then in ten years there is a new standard and all the old charging stations are now obsolete.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Seems the English way to do things. Teach your kids to wire their own plugs.
To help achieve that goal, the U.K. will reportedly establish a 400-million-pound ($531 million) fund for companies that manufacture and install charging stations.
Uh, why would these companies, that have just been handed a government mandate that everybody use their equipment, need more funds? They should be making money hand over fist once this requirement goes into effect.
if anything, this will drive UP the value of existing homes since they aren't subject to this new requirement.
FFS, installing a home charger costs about $250 in parts including the plug. It's about $50 in parts if you just want to install a high amp circuit 20 feet from the circuit breaker.
It's a few hundred extra bucks to have an electrician and install it once your house is prebuilt. This will drive down the price if anything of existing homes since a new home will include a charger that cost the developer maybe $300 (on top of $700,000) but an existing home will cost $800 for an electrician to come out for 3 hours and run cable through a finished wall.
From TFA:
"It is our intention that all new homes, where appropriate, should have a charge point available," a government statement said.
Civil servants aren't idiots. They won't require car recharging in a 14th floor apartment.
"We plan to consult as soon as possible on introducing a requirement for charge point infrastructure for new dwellings in England."
So even if they are idiots, non-idiots will get to tell them so before regulations get made.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Do you have a car park? Then the charge point would be there. If not, it's obviously not talking about you.
- Chuq
From TFA:
"It is our intention that all new homes, where appropriate, should have a charge point available," a government statement said.
(emphasis added.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
AC Some have new parking spaces and might even have new parking garages. Its a thing that can be done when building new.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Part and parcel of getting approval in a big city. People building new have got to be prepared for these sort of new regulations for new dwellings.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
1) Read the one sentence summary "charger in every new home".
2) Don't bother to read the fine article, which includes words like "where appropriate" and "consult".
3) Assume that "charger in every new home" will be applied rigidly even when it makes no sense. This will be a regulation which will probably run to hundreds of pages, but pretend that one sentence says everything you need to know about it. Also pretend that the people writing regulations are drooling idiots.
4) Conclude that the policy will lead to idiotic outcomes, rather than realizing you are making idiotic interpretation
5) Post as AC about how idiotic this policy is
6) ????
7) Profit!
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Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
In one alternate universe nobody owns cars anyway, just autonomous rides requested by us from A to B. Then the shared car goes off and charges itself up in the nearest distributed charging station.
Along private gentrified streets and in new dwellings with their own parking space.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This would be for new homes, - not existing. I would guess they'd be smart enough to also require 200 Amp service (or more) if that's what's needed.
From what I understand the base Model 3 only charges at 40 amps anyway. The model X and S are about 72 amps but the literature I've seen is that the charger will run on as little a 15 amps. It will take forever to get a full charge that way, but that's all that's required. If you were to go with 40 amps, the Model 3 charges at a rate of 30 miles per every hour it's plugged in, the Model S is 23 miles per hour, and the Model X is 20. So even with the Model X, 40 amps gets you 200 miles of range for 10 hours of charging.
A Chevy Bolt with 238 mile range takes about 9.5 hours to charge at 240 volts / 32 amps.
Since you're probably not starting at zero all the time, the actual time it takes to top off the charge will be much less. 40 amps seems to be adequate even if not ideal for some vehicles.
I recently bought a 1st generation Chevy Volt (not a Bolt) which is a plug-in hybrid. It's only has a 40 mile electric range, then a gasoline powered "range extender" kicks in. I'm currently using a plain old 120 volt outlet to charge it. Takes 11 hours if starting from zero. It will take less if the circuit is a dedicated one and can draw 12 amps. Installing a Level 2 "EVSE" requires 240 volts and at least 16 amps. That will get charge times down to 4.5 hours. I plan on installing a 240 outlet with a 20 amp circuit because currently I only have 100 amp service. But I'll run wiring capable of handling at least 40 amps so that if I ever do get a pure EV, I can get proper charging without running more wire out to the garage, but I will need upgraded service.
I would assume a single outlet high amperage circuit in a garage, or a level 2 charger if there's only a driveway (outdoor ones are supposed to be wired, not plugged in).
It is very likely that all cars will be able to take level 2 for a long time (since it can charge a typical day of driving in a few hours using nothing exotic, it'll likely be the primary charging used).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Outdoor ones come in both wired and plugin versions. It's purely a preference.
Any new builds have infrastructure set up for handling the charging of electric cars.
It totally bites if you live in an apartment that was built more than about 20 years ago, however... there is simply not enough interest by the owners to invest in the necessary upgrades.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
TFA is an announcement of intention to consult before making the regulations. If they do this consultation competently, they'll consider the implications on the power connection to the houses, and make some compromise between required current capacity of the EV charging circuit and the required current supply to the house. They might only require a 20 amp or 40 amp charging circuit, or require different current limits in different locations, depending on the state of the local electricity grid. It is also possible that they won't consult competently, and (for example) they'll demand circuits which capacity the grid can't possibly supply.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
No, it means that you can't buy a car unless you have a garage to charge it in.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Oh, I was skimming them a few days ago (trying to prep my house to get a plugin hybrid), and the couple I looked at said they needed to be wired in if outdoor.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It's almost as if you didn't read that they'd said charge points would be required "where appropriate"
Teslas charge fine on a 7kW supply (230V 32A) and that is a completely normal supply in the UK.
1. What is the problem you're trying to solve here? Why woul you need to know who is parking where? Recharging of the electricity bill? There are low cost solutions for that (Ubitricity) or you simply recharge via the service charge. The costs of the power are low anyway, so it's not crucial to get the recharging absolutely right.
2. Supply cables will *not* need to be upgraded. Why would they? The max draw is 7kW, which is well within safety limits. Maybe an isolator will need to be fitted at each house, but supply won't be an issue. It's not like everyone will be charging their cars at max draw all at the same time, after all. I charge my car a couple of times a week, if that, and it has a puny range of 90miles. Lots of people like me out there.
3. See 2
4. Vandalise or steal what, exactly? A charge point on a house's outside wall? I've never ever ever heard of that happening. It's no more likely than a drainpipe being vandalised or stolen.
For newly build infrastructure, the extra cost of providing more capacity is small. The biggest part of the cost is digging trenches, not the thicker copper. It would be much more expensive to install traditional wiring, and then having to upgrade later.
"how do you work out who is parking where without expensive infrastructure for telling what vehicle is plugged into where ?"
Easy and already solved. Plug in your car, and present chip card/bank card/smartphone to turn on the power.
"Even if it's bolted to the ground in the UK someone will try and steal it."
So, let's not provide any services to people, because gangs will destroy or steal it.
No.
So not "every" new home then.
It won't be in the flat, it will be by the mandatory parking space that is almost always required for new developments.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The government really needs to get on top of installing public charging infrastructure for residences where they can't have their own personal one, e.g. houses without a driveway or flats without dedicated parking spots. Otherwise in a short time those properties will be worth a lot less because you can't charge your car at home, costing out potentially thousands of Pounds a year and limiting your choice of vehicle.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That is going to mean a huge jump in toxic waste. Where are they going to put all those wasted batteries going into the next century?
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The first thing I thought of was "poor energy grid"
One of the daily peaks in power usage is when people get home from work and start cooking dinner.
They want everyone to drive electric cars and charge them at home.
That's going to add "plug in their car to charge" around the same time of day they turn on their oven/stove and in winter, heaters..
"Where appropriate"
If there is no space to park a car on the property, how is it appropriate to have a car charger?
They will get all those battery chargers installed. Then, in 10 - 20 years, storage enabling practical electric cars for all situations will finally be perfected. It will be not batteries, but supercapacitors, that will run most efficiently at several thousand volts and draw very high initial currents. The battery chargers will be capable of neither the high voltage nor the surge currents that the supercapacitors will want to draw, and require complete replacement. In twenty years there will have been millions of dollars wasted. Finis!
Lots of people will plug their car in when they arrive home from work.
Lots of people work 9-5 and get home at similar times.
When it's cold, they also turn their heaters on when they get home.
A lot of people cook their own dinner too, which they start soon after they get home from work. Lots of those people have electric ranges.
My house could easily draw 10kW when the hot water cylinder if heating (it's about 3kW) because the kids are in the shower, the oven and cooktop (the whole oven/range is rated at 240V, 45A (10kW) if everything is all in use, but in reality its not at any one time.) is going because dinner is being cooked and the heat pump (about 2kW) is on too.
That's on top of everything else in the house - lights, electronics, fridges, washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, space heaters.
Often the hot water cylinder won't run at that time during winter though, because the power company has turned them all off (google "ripple control") to manage peak power consumption.
The house main fuse is 60A, so anything over 15kW is going to risk popping it. That's me with my heat pump on, the water cylinder heating, the jug boiling water for a coffee and the car charging. 2 + 3 + 2.4 + 7 = 14.4kW, or 60A at 240V.
If I turned the oven on I risk tripping the main circuit breaker.
It's not uncommon to have a 5kW hot water cylinder either, it's an option for the one I have.
To upgrade the main breaker they'd need to run new cables to the house. Need a new power meter too.
They're going to have to do the same thing they do with electric hot water with car chargers.
However, just having high voltage to the right place and done in a way that it could be accessed/upgraded easily would be a great idea.
That's called an electrical socket. You may have heard of them. Neat thing is that you can plug anything you want into them.
Seriously, run the high voltage line to where it needs to be and allow for the charge station to be installed/replaced later. The expensive bit is the electrical contractor's time. Putting a charge station on the wall is easy and trivial. I'm in the process of doing that to my house this very week. I need a 240V line for a level 2 charging station run in my garage for my Bolt EV. Once the line is run, installing the charger itself is childs play. If someone had already installed a charger there so much the better even it it wasn't the latest tech. The electricians time is costing me more than the charger.
Basically it's easy and cheap to install the power lines when building a new home. It's a lot more expensive to do it after the fact. I don't know that it's necessary to actually install a charger but it might be reasonable to require that the house be wired to accommodate one.
Just don't require the actual charger to be installed, because it will be obsolete far too quickly.
Not very likely. It doesn't have to be the latest or greatest to be useful either and there is nothing prohibiting people from upgrading them in the future if necessary. Installing an actual charger is probably not sensible but running the lines to permit one seems like a very good idea on new construction.
Um. They just put in an isolator switch. Sometimes they'll bump the fuse up from 60 to 100A. No new supply cables, no new meter. I know this because they did it in my house.
Not so here in the UK - we get ripped off for everything.
Right now, if you buy an electric car, you can get £500 towards the purchase of a charge unit (from the government). Guess what!? all charge units magically cost £499. After that you need to fit the thing, and for that you'll need a 16A armoured cable from a dedicated RCD on your fuse board. We got ours fitted for free by Mitsubishi, but they'll only really run the cable and connect it up - if your fuse board isn't new enough, isn't big enough or accessible enough, then you'll need your own spark to come and fix up all of that before the "free" connection comes along (our "free" guy said he's move the stuff off the RCD he used "on the quiet" because he's not even supposed to do that - the RCD has to be literally empty when he shows up). Our install was simple, but I'd say you could get charged a couple of hundred quid for it, if you got your own spark to do it.
If this regulation mandated that you had to have a 16A feed to your garage or driveway or to your allocated parking space or whatever then it would make a lot of sense. The cost of the charge units would come down to real levels rather than inflated ones, and people would be free to buy a good looking charge unit rather than the utter mingers a lot of the companies force on you. Further, you'd get the charger right for your car, could get a 'smart' one if you want, can get one that will alternate between two cars or whatever.
If the regulation went further and said you need a 32A feed, then things get really funky. The usual properly-wide fuse in the UK is 60A, so if your car is pulling the full 32A, you can blow the fuse by boiling the kettle while straightening your hair (pretty much). Some newish properties in the UK have no gas, so they use electric heating - again, that 32A feed is going to be a real problem there. I seriously doubt any of the grid can really cope with 50% of the houses pulling the full 60A at the same time, never mind all of them doing so. In practical terms, the only way we're ever really going to have 32A feeds is if we have some sort of battery storage for it - and there's no way these regulations will demand all of that.
So... expect some terrible legislation that will be (ab)used by the charge point manufacturers to inflate their profits, whilst charging the house-buyer and consumer for it. Expect the regulations to be woefully out of date in a matter of years, but not updated to reflect that, so you'll have to have a charge point you can't use as well as putting in one yourself that you can. Can't wait.
Yes, ideas such as the ones you describe have been in the plans for years. Dynamic price signaling has been considered as a primary mechanism (from the power company perspective) and information source (from the load perspective) for automated, distributed decisionmaking.
The company I worked for 6-10 years ago was one of many studying the logic of using electric vehicles for load leveling, including pulling from the vehicles during peak loads. I believe every grid operator has had plans on the drawing board for at least a decade. From a grid perspective, development has had a tendency to plan for smart solutions leading to broad distribution rather then yet more high loading of existing infrastructure or capital-intensive new infrastructure.
Electric vehicles have been seen as a potentially important way to offset the variability of alternative sources, and to move peak supply closer to peak loads, essentially augmenting existing time-leveling ideas with spatially distributed leveling.
Except that J1772 is a single phase solution.
So are most homes so your point is what exactly? Yes three phase has advantages but very little equipment in most houses is designed for it. You can get it if you want but it's extra hassle in a lot of cases.
If the future that eventuates is this car-summoned-on-demand one, then yes, this policy will waste money.
I think the probability of this is remarkable low for most of the globe. Presuming the technology works (not yet a given but good chance of it happening), the economics of "summon on demand" cars manifestly dictates you need to live in an area with a certain population density. There probably are other second order problems too like theft, vandalism, hacking, etc (remember nobody is guarding the vehicle) that people aren't really paying enough attention to yet but may/will turn out to be significant problems. There also will be the human psychology issue to work out. People don't like change and this would be a pretty major lifestyle change for millions.
I think if you live in an area where taxis are a daily reality then it might make sense for that locale. I don't really see it working out in suburbia or rural areas though. Demand would be very inconsistent (rush hour twice daily then... ?) and it would have a large number of vehicles sitting idle just like they do now. Hard to see where the profit to a company would be in doing that. But in a place like Manhattan where things operate a lot more 24/7 and with a high population density and limited garage space I could see it being a pretty useful technology.
If the future that eventuates is that most people own their own electric cars, this policy will save money.
Seems substantially more likely but you are right that there is still a non-negligible uncertainty involved. But I think if they require the garages to be wired for new construction and major renovations that's pretty minimal cost for pretty substantial long term gain.
1) Not all houses in the UK come with a parking space right outside or garage. A lot are apartments or communal parking - how do you work out who is parking where without expensive infrastructure for telling what vehicle is plugged into where ?
Figuring out where a car is parked is a trivial exercise when they are plugged into an electric charging port. If you are going to install the charging equipment anyway then it is pretty much a non-issue at that point. Heck I have an EV and it has both LTE and WiFi and putting GPS on it would be a trivial exercise. Wouldn't be hard to pinpoint at all even if I wasn't plugged into something.
2) It's not just the cost of the charger - The supply cables going to the house will need to be upgraded along with ALL the infrastructure right back to the grid transformer - that isn't cheap. 3 phase to each house would be a good idea as it would solve the voltage issues but 3 phase to new builds is not common in the UK and I suspect the cost would be exorbitant.
Most houses can accommodate a car charger without any upgrades to service at all. Here in the US all construction for the last several decades has a 200A drop to the house which is more than adequate. The Level 2 charger I am currently adding to my house draws 32A max so even if I had 100A service that would still probably work. Three phase to the house isn't necessary or especially beneficial. Odds are all the equipment in your house already is single phase and it works fine. Most of the upgrades would really be the back end stuff the power company has to worry about anyway.
3) See 2). The current grid infrastructure in many areas may not be able to handle the increased load over time.
That's only a problem if we place demands on the grid for EVs faster than we can upgrade the grid. I see no evidence of that becoming a problem any time soon.
4) Vandalism - in many parts of the UK there are lots of little scrotes who will vandalise/destroy this kind of stuff in a day or two. Not to mention various gangs around the county who make a tidy living stealing cables along railway lines/motorways etc. Even if it's bolted to the ground in the UK someone will try and steal it.
There are well understood solutions to this too. Not as if cars and other stuff doesn't get stolen today. Worrying about vandalism and theft isn't something that should deter us from working towards a future with EVs.
The house main fuse is 60A, so anything over 15kW is going to risk popping it.
Sounds like they didn't really plan for the future so stuff will need upgrading. We did this in the US a long time ago. I have 200A service to my house (standard these days) and even older houses in the US rarely have less than 100A service. Sounds like the UK needs to get started sooner rather than later on this project. The longer they wait the more expensive it will be.
Why the fuck do they want to install chargers inside homes? The chargers should be installed outside!
Idiots!
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I have a few friends that live in multi story condos with parking garages. At this time, there is no easy way to run a 30 Amp (or more) circuit from their panel down to the garage so they can charge an electric car. The condo management has pretty much drawn the line at plugging small refrigerators into the common metered outlets provided in the adjacent storage closets. So, no all electric vehicles.
It would be a simple matter to add a metered circuit of sufficient capacity at each parking stall. And then allow an installer to add the correct charging hardware to that point for the tennant's choice of vehicle if such circuits were put in at the time of construction. But not easily done now.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just built a new home in Canada (Ontario), new for code in 2018 was that a conduit be installed from the electrical panel to the garage for a future electric car charger. No infrastructure other than the conduit and junction box were installed, but it's nice to have it for some point in the future.
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
I've read a lot from people in the UK about how you can pull off of a UK outlet because they are 240 from people... then come and read that from you houses are wired at 60 amps...
Here in the US we have 240v's wired into the house, my house is old and the main breaker is only 100 amps... most newer houses it's at least 200...
I've got 50 amps run to my garage for a 40 amp evse, and 20 amps for lights and outlets, I need to upgrade one run of wire and the breaker to move the garage to 70 amps... at which point my garage will have more power than most of the homes in the UK if what you tell me is true (that'll let me charge the car while using power tools in the garage... or charge two cars because I've got a smart evse that can network with a second one to ensure the total amperage is below whatever the breaker is...)
But it's great that any given outlet in the UK is capable of what, 12 amps and 240v... that extra 500-1000w per outlet is probably really handy (most outlets in the US are wired 15 or 20 amps (usually 20 on newer construction) 120v) for your tea kettles.
Depends on the ratings of the existing cables and power meter.
Yes, but the context is government policy specifically about new build, in which case this really really isn't an issue at all. And I'm a member of an EV club for Zoe owners, and there are regular questions about home charger installations, but no-one's ever been told to replace their cable and meter.
That was Slashdot, not the government. The government said "where appropriate"
I got my first troll reply!! I am SO excite!
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