Carbon footprint and public transport

[Bantamzen]

I think what your not considering is that storage via V2G involves no real capital outlay as the infrastructure is in essence already required for other uses eg as a car. Grid level storage will come with costs for grid connections and the hardware etc. V2G will not have these costs so will be cheaper.In reality a mix of both large scale and V2G will probably be deployed.

Well that's not strictly true, car owners are still having the outlay as EVs are still more expensive than their ICE equivalents. But besides that, it should not be up to the customers to provide the energy companies the infrastructure, at least not directly. Ideally that should come through public-private investments. I mean what would happen if energy prices went through the roof again and everyone stopped using / charging their EVs? Having a national network of green energy storage facilities is far more robust than relying on EVs, even if that requires intial investment by the energy companies and government.

On a side note fleet owners will have the potential of another revenue source. I'm working on a scheme to use electric dustcarts and V2G is part of the plan.

It may work better for fleets I'll admit, as use and charging times will be at least a bit easier to forecast. I'm not sure however I would rely on extra income from it in the long term, more as a nice bonus when it happens.

 

[edwin_m]

Well that's not strictly true, car owners are still having the outlay as EVs are still more expensive than their ICE equivalents. But besides that, it should not be up to the customers to provide the energy companies the infrastructure, at least not directly. Ideally that should come through public-private investments. I mean what would happen if energy prices went through the roof again and everyone stopped using / charging their EVs? Having a national network of green energy storage facilities is far more robust than relying on EVs, even if that requires intial investment by the energy companies and government.

The premise is that the car owner would be buying the EV anyway, and defraying a bit of the cost by getting paid to use it as grid storage. If for some reason this didn't happen then more of other, more expensive, forms of storage would have to be built, and the cost for those would ultimately come back to the consumer.

 

[Bantamzen]

The premise is that the car owner would be buying the EV anyway, and defraying a bit of the cost by getting paid to use it as grid storage. If for some reason this didn't happen then more of other, more expensive, forms of storage would have to be built, and the cost for those would ultimately come back to the consumer.

That just doesn't sound like a very robust solution at all I'm afraid. Its the kind of thing that could easily bite us on the behind.

 

[Bald Rick]

But besides that, it should not be up to the customers to provide the energy companies the infrastructure, at least not directly.

But its already done - have a look at all the solar panels on private dwellings.

That just doesn't sound like a very robust solution at all I'm afraid. Its the kind of thing that could easily bite us on the behind.

It will be part of the solution. There will be grid scale storage, of course, and lots of it. But the attraction of having elctricity stored locally, and used locally, is very high as it reduces stress on the grid and DNO networks.

 

[urbophile]

I feel that in any city or conurbation public transport should be good enough to do most of the heavy lifting, with reasonably priced taxis seen as an extension. This removes most of the need for any private vehicle ownership/use, which in turn deals with the exclusion of poorer households..

Well said. This thread seems to have been diverted to the viability of private EVs, and the technicalities surrounding that. Of course cars will always have place in the scheme of things, but the UK's dependence on car ownership and use (we're not the only guilty country of course) is bad for the environment in so many ways. Not just pollution and dependence on fossil fuels, but traffic congestion, the waste of resources in manufacturing them, the distortions they cause to town planning by imposing Milton Keynes/LA type geography on our formerly compact cities, the visual clutter and impediment to pedestrians caused by street parking.... I could go on.

For a typical and unextreme example, the street where I live is a cul-de-sac with a well used pedestrian footpath at one end, leading to a station and bus stop. Although many houses have off-street parking space, because so many households have more than one car the street is lined one both sides with parked cars for much of the time. The street is too narrow to allow other traffic to pass them unless they park partially on the pavement. This means that pedestrians – including those with buggies, disabilities and visual impairment – are forced to either squeeze into a narrow gap between a car and an overgrown hedge, assuming there is even room, or walk down the middle of the street which has surprisingly much traffic. Yet there is a station with a frequent train service three minutes walk away, and frequent buses not much further. This scenario is replicated in maybe the majority of suburban and inner city streets all over the country.

 

[Class 317]

But its already done - have a look at all the solar panels on private dwellings.



It will be part of the solution. There will be grid scale storage, of course, and lots of it. But the attraction of having elctricity stored locally, and used locally, is very high as it reduces stress on the grid and DNO networks.

It's also a more resilient system if you have energy storage widely distributed. Less chance of a single point failure.

 

[Noddy]

This a fascinating thread with lots of interesting information.

However your point is correct that all the infrastructure in the world won't make the necessary difference to prices, until the supply is split off from a global energy market which key suppliers are prepared to manipulate for their own benefit.

This sounds remarkably like removing control of the energy market from the fossil fuel industry/lobby/cartel and transitioning to a distributed model…

 

[Bantamzen]

This sounds remarkably like removing control of the energy market from the fossil fuel industry/lobby/cartel and transitioning to a distributed model…

Let me correct that for you...

"

This sounds remarkably like removing control of the energy market from the fossil fuel/wind/solar industry/lobby/cartel and transitioning to a distributed model…

 

[yorksrob]

This sounds remarkably like removing control of the energy market from the fossil fuel industry/lobby/cartel and transitioning to a distributed model…

Let me correct that for you...

"

Suppose that an energy system with more renewables will be more distributed at source, although there's no reason why a system with some larger scale generation can't be better deployed in the public interest.

 

[Bantamzen]

Suppose that an energy system with more renewables will be more distributed at source, although there's no reason why a system with some larger scale generation can't be better deployed in the public interest.

My primary issue with EV storage is that it's simply not going to be as reliable as a larger scaled, fixed solution. EV storage reliability will not only require EVs to be routinely charged overnight (which to be fair most will be, but I'll get onto some issues here in a moment), but plugged in routinely during the day when the stored energy is required. And herein is the first problem, much of the country simply doesn't have the infrastructure to make that reliable. I don't doubt that there are pockets of areas where charging points are a-plenty, but there are far more where they are not. That's a problem, and one that isn't getting solved quickly, or cheaply.

There's then the issue of people who can't necessarily charge overnight, and there's a lot of people who can't. One of the most frustrating things about the EV debate is some owners of them dismissing the notion that people without drives or allocated parking will have any problems charging them. But without a reliable means to charge overnight, future owners of EVs are going to have to rely on refuelling stations, or on-street / parking garage slots with charge points. But they are going to be in competition with owners of fully charged EVs looking for a place to discharge and earn back a little on them, making the EV storage solution even less reliable. And with ICE vehicles going to be legally purchasable for at least another decade, it's going to be an issue for some time to come.

Having a reliable, predicable storage solution for energy sources that aren't always reliable and predicable is absolutely essential. EVs are not that yet, and in my humble opinion will never be. EVs do have a place in a cleaner future, I don't dispute that more a moment, but they are not a cure-all for the issues of growing energy needs and finding effective ways to store excess energy produced. It seems to me that to some are too focused on the targets set by politicians than the actual solutions. I remember a decade ago being an almost sole voice being highly cynical about VivaRail's new 230 project, when much of the rest of the forum saw them as a panacea for Northern's Pacer replacement requirements and beyond, so I'm very used to swimming against the tide of opinion. And I remain completely unconvinced that EV storage is reliable, is not going drive up costs through market pressures, and therefore is a solution we should put any of our energy reliance on. At best I see it as a little bonus at the end of the week, like winning a few quid on the Friday EuroMillions. You'll take it, but you are sure as hell not going to rely on it to keep your personal finances afloat.

 

[Bald Rick]

My primary issue with EV storage is that it's simply not going to be as reliable as a larger scaled, fixed solution. EV storage reliability will not only require EVs to be routinely charged overnight (which to be fair most will be, but I'll get onto some issues here in a moment), but plugged in routinely during the day when the stored energy is required. And herein is the first problem, much of the country simply doesn't have the infrastructure to make that reliable. I don't doubt that there are pockets of areas where charging points are a-plenty, but there are far more where they are not. That's a problem, and one that isn't getting solved quickly, or cheaply.

I think this is the crux of the matter. There is no suggestion that at any one time the entire fleet of EVs would be needed for storage, or anything like it. Inreality, the country won’t need anything more than a small percentage - perhaps 7-10% at most of the EV fleet - at the peak times needed for storage. The Grid won’t rely on it until it knows - after years of experience in running it - what take up is like. There will be much more Grid level storage, but this will be a useful (and cheap) bonus, with pricing mechanisms to help at the high peaks. Even at the level where it can be used to shift demand, ie encouraging charging at times of oversupply, it will help somewhat.

 

[Bantamzen]

I think this is the crux of the matter. There is no suggestion that at any one time the entire fleet of EVs would be needed for storage, or anything like it. Inreality, the country won’t need anything more than a small percentage - perhaps 7-10% at most of the EV fleet - at the peak times needed for storage. The Grid won’t rely on it until it knows - after years of experience in running it - what take up is like. Ther will be muchmore Grid level storage, but this will be a useful (and cheap) bonus, with pricing mechanisms to help at the high peaks.

Even at the level where it can be used to shift deamn, ie encouraging charging at times of oversupply, it will help somewhat.

I mean so long as the grid does not rely on it, then my only other concern as mentioned are those market forces. Extra selling and buying back of energy is potentially a low hanging fruit for energy companies looking to wring us dry, erm maximise profits. I'm afraid I don't believe for a second that they will use this to inflate prices.

(As you may be able to tell, I'm not a huge fan of energy company profit models as they stand today in this country. )

 

[edwin_m]

I mean so long as the grid does not rely on it, then my only other concern as mentioned are those market forces. Extra selling and buying back of energy is potentially a low hanging fruit for energy companies looking to wring us dry, erm maximise profits. I'm afraid I don't believe for a second that they will not use this to inflate prices.

(As you may be able to tell, I'm not a huge fan of energy company profit models as they stand today in this country. )

Bit in bold - I think was what you intended to say here?

A company could spring up that organised payment to EV owners who signed up, according to how much they made their vehicles available for grid storage and how much of a "reserve" they requested to keep in their batteries to account for planned or unplanned use. For example someone with an ailing relative living some distance away would always want to have enough charge to get there in a hurry. And I imagine this payment would be metered by how much time the car was actually plugged in at the relevant times of day, so people weren't committed in advance to do that a certain number of days per week. Thus the individual user's contribution might vary, but aggregating across hundreds of thousands of vehicles would iron these fluctuations out.

This company could then bid to provide storage capacity to the grid in competition with companies running pumped storage, battery farms or anything else. The power market is hugely complicated and I don't claim to understand the details, but essentially way the market works the lowest bidders would be commissioned to provide the storage, with some sort of adjustment for response time and efficiency. The EV company should do well on all these criteria and offer a good price too, due to having virtually no infrastructure of its own to pay for, so is likely to be paid most of the time. It takes the risk of being in a situation where it's services aren't wanted but it probably still has to pay the EV owners, in which case it might have to price below cost for a while but if this became frequent it would go out of business.

 

[Falcon1200]

but many motorists, especially in the lower income brackets, only use cars because the alternative is so awful.

Yet there is a station with a frequent train service three minutes walk away, and frequent buses not much further. This scenario is replicated in maybe the majority of suburban and inner city streets all over the country.

Perhaps the train does not go where the residents need to be, at the times they have to travel?

I have the great benefit of free travel on both train and bus, yet when I visit my daughter I drive. Why? Because it takes less than 40 minutes, door to door, at whatever time I want to leave and return, and I can carry as much as I need to in the car. The same journey by public transport involves two buses and two trains, or two walks, one quite long, in whatever the weather was doing, and two trains; And would take well over two hours - each way. No matter what is invested in improving public transport it will never be a viable or realistic alternative to the car for such a journey, and many others.

I last bought a car 3 years ago, and an electric vehicle would actually have suited me; But not at the cost of £10,000 more! If however, the price of electric vehicles was at or close to that of petrol/diesel models, I would be quite happy to electrify; Charging at home would not be a problem, elsewhere might however. This of course disregards the issues of national electricity supply, battery manufacture, safety, disposal, etc.....

 

[AndrewE]

My primary issue with EV storage is that it's simply not going to be as reliable as a larger scaled, fixed solution. EV storage reliability will not only require EVs to be routinely charged overnight (which to be fair most will be, but I'll get onto some issues here in a moment), but plugged in routinely during the day when the stored energy is required. And herein is the first problem, much of the country simply doesn't have the infrastructure to make that reliable. I don't doubt that there are pockets of areas where charging points are a-plenty, but there are far more where they are not. That's a problem, and one that isn't getting solved quickly, or cheaply.

I think you are over-egging this. It seems to be working perfectly well for the people who want it to work, although I agree there will be people who can't make it work fo a variety of reasons.

I mean so long as the grid does not rely on it, then my only other concern as mentioned are those market forces. Extra selling and buying back of energy is potentially a low hanging fruit for energy companies looking to wring us dry, erm maximise profits. I'm afraid I don't believe for a second that they will use this to inflate prices.
(As you may be able to tell, I'm not a huge fan of energy company profit models as they stand today in this country. )

Yes, the financial structure of our energy system has been designed to allow as much money to be extracted from us as possible which is absolutely the wrong driver for something as important as this (in the same way as water and other vital infrastructure should be run properly to underpin the economy.)

However I think our differing level of approval of the ev and home battery developments stems from having very different philosophies. The present developments are anathema to what I think of as the command/control strategy, where you want big providers to dominate, whereas my take on it is that we are seeing the first steps to decarbonise the economy but moving forward in a smarter way. Yes, interconnectors are being built and maybe more are needed, but that is still the sledgehammer approach. Making the railways work does depend on this, power distribution need not and might be better without it.

By going to decentralised storage we cut the need for so much interconnector capacity, reduce (could even eliminate) curtailment of renewable electricity and also reduce the amount of upgrades the local networks will need. "The market" can be used to encourage the spread of this and I suspect that some of the Octopus tarrifs are actually experiments funded by OfGem or whoever to see what can be done in this respect.
I saw a calculation that suggested that if you put the money from just 1 nuclear power station into giving every house in Scotland batteries we wouldn't need it anyway.
I think of it as like the internet: it was developed to ensure that communications wouldn't be broken by missile strikes on a couple of big telephone exchanges or cable routes... this is doing a similar thing for power.

 

[Bantamzen]

Bit in bold - I think was what you intended to say here?

Yes thank you it was, I'll go back and amend it.

A company could spring up that organised payment to EV owners who signed up, according to how much they made their vehicles available for grid storage and how much of a "reserve" they requested to keep in their batteries to account for planned or unplanned use. For example someone with an ailing relative living some distance away would always want to have enough charge to get there in a hurry. And I imagine this payment would be metered by how much time the car was actually plugged in at the relevant times of day, so people weren't committed in advance to do that a certain number of days per week. Thus the individual user's contribution might vary, but aggregating across hundreds of thousands of vehicles would iron these fluctuations out.

This company could then bid to provide storage capacity to the grid in competition with companies running pumped storage, battery farms or anything else. The power market is hugely complicated and I don't claim to understand the details, but essentially way the market works the lowest bidders would be commissioned to provide the storage, with some sort of adjustment for response time and efficiency. The EV company should do well on all these criteria and offer a good price too, due to having virtually no infrastructure of its own to pay for, so is likely to be paid most of the time. It takes the risk of being in a situation where it's services aren't wanted but it probably still has to pay the EV owners, in which case it might have to price below cost for a while but if this became frequent it would go out of business.

I'm just not sure have this kind of extra layer in the supply train will drive prices in the right direction. As I mentioned upthread, in the early days of green energy planning the aspiration was not only to have a de-carbonised system, but bring costs down for the end users. This may not be as possible, if at all if you add in additional companies and layers of expectations of profit. It tends to go the other way when this happens.

I think you are over-egging this. It seems to be working perfectly well for the people who want it to work, although I agree there will be people who can't make it work fo a variety of reasons.

By and large at the moment it does. But once EV ownership is driven up by either reducing costs of the EVs, or through legislation in a decade, the infrastructure will need to scale with it and include enough for both those needing to charge & those who wish to sell excess. I'm not sure that's in focus right now.

Yes, the financial structure of our energy system has been designed to allow as much money to be extracted from us as possible which is absolutely the wrong driver for something as important as this (in the same way as water and other vital infrastructure should be run properly to underpin the economy.)

However I think our differing level of approval of the ev and home battery developments stems from having very different philosophies. The present developments are anathema to what I think of as the command/control strategy, where you want big providers to dominate, whereas my take on it is that we are seeing the first steps to decarbonise the economy but moving forward in a smarter way. Yes, interconnectors are being built and maybe more are needed, but that is still the sledgehammer approach. Making the railways work does depend on this, power distribution need not and might be better without it.

By going to decentralised storage we cut the need for so much interconnector capacity, reduce (could even eliminate) curtailment of renewable electricity and also reduce the amount of upgrades the local networks will need. "The market" can be used to encourage the spread of this and I suspect that some of the Octopus tarrifs are actually experiments funded by OfGem or whoever to see what can be done in this respect.
I saw a calculation that suggested that if you put the money from just 1 nuclear power station into giving every house in Scotland batteries we wouldn't need it anyway.
I think of it as like the internet: it was developed to ensure that communications wouldn't be broken by missile strikes on a couple of big telephone exchanges or cable routes... this is doing a similar thing for power.

However your analogy is somewhat flawed, the internet is not devolved down to individual user storage level, in fact its going quite the opposite way with large scale storage providers such as AWS now dominating the market. EV storage may sound like some utopian, de-centralised system, but in reality will it really work that way? Or will the energy companies just form / buy up third party companies to handle the redistribution of EV storage, using it as another way to inflate prices. Given the cynical world of global energy, I don't see your idea of how it might work ever coming to fruition.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

I'm just not sure have this kind of extra layer in the supply train will drive prices in the right direction. As I mentioned upthread, in the early days of green energy planning the aspiration was not only to have a de-carbonised system, but bring costs down for the end users. This may not be as possible, if at all if you add in additional companies and layers of expectations of profit. It tends to go the other way when this happens.

The myth that moving to a renewable system is going to bring costs down is pretty much dead. We saw what happened at AR5 (Allocation Round for renewable subsidies) a few months ago when it was set at £44/MWh for offshore wind no one turned up at the party. DENZ have now set the figure at £77/MWh nearly double to encourage bidders. Then there is all the hidden costs of running a renewable system through the need to have a lot more standby power still available to fill in for the windless and cloudless days. V2G will just add another layer to this complexity and leave the ESO even further removed from being in overall control of the grid. As we saw a few years ago it doesn't take much of a disturbance on teh system to cause cascade trippings leading to blackouts.

 

[AndrewE]

However your analogy is somewhat flawed, the internet is not devolved down to individual user storage level, in fact its going quite the opposite way with large scale storage providers such as AWS now dominating the market. EV storage may sound like some utopian, de-centralised system, but in reality will it really work that way? Or will the energy companies just form / buy up third party companies to handle the redistribution of EV storage, using it as another way to inflate prices. Given the cynical world of global energy, I don't see your idea of how it might work ever coming to fruition.

I think you have just proved my point. The Internet is the communication system, originally used by people with computers... which is/was a completely decentralised system of computing power and data storage.

What you are describing is the way that big business has reacted to get control back -r you could say to exploit an opportunity that they have spotted. They "relieve" users of the need for their own storage and even computing power by providing it... and getting complete control, using a publicly funded communications network as far as I can see.
I abandoned MS Word because I found that I couldn't create a document unless it started life in their "cloud."
Using home power storage you can either let the companies run the import/export if you trust them, or you can control it yourself if you can be bothered to look at the next day's predicted prices and your expected electricity needs and set your system accordingly.

As said, I think we have totally different ideas of what a suitable philosophy for running the country is.

 

[edwin_m]

The myth that moving to a renewable system is going to bring costs down is pretty much dead. We saw what happened at AR5 (Allocation Round for renewable subsidies) a few months ago when it was set at £44/MWh for offshore wind no one turned up at the party. DENZ have now set the figure at £77/MWh nearly double to encourage bidders.

The strike price for Hinkley Point was £89.50/MWh at 2013 prices, indexed to Consumer Price Index, so will be way over that figure by now. Inflation makes EV energy storage even more attractive, as long as people can still afford the EVs, as there is virtually no other spend required.

Attempting to wrench this thread back towards topic, grid storage won't really work with battery trains and buses, as they are probably in use when the grid needs the energy back. But they can save money and CO2 by making use of surplus renewable electricity to charge overnight.

 

[urbophile]

Perhaps the train does not go where the residents need to be, at the times they have to travel?

I have the great benefit of free travel on both train and bus, yet when I visit my daughter I drive. Why? Because it takes less than 40 minutes, door to door, at whatever time I want to leave and return, and I can carry as much as I need to in the car. The same journey by public transport involves two buses and two trains, or two walks, one quite long, in whatever the weather was doing, and two trains; And would take well over two hours - each way. No matter what is invested in improving public transport it will never be a viable or realistic alternative to the car for such a journey, and many others.

Of course one size doesn't fit all. There will aways be journeys for which private transport is the only realistic solution. But any civilised society ought to enable the majority of journeys for the majority of people to be made by frequent and efficient public transport*. And before anyone says 'think of the cost', the key word is efficient. The more investment is put into reliable systems now the cheaper they will cost to run and and less damage to the environment in all sorts of ways.

*at least in urban areas. Rural ones have their own problems but over-reliance on private transport risks turning the countryside into the preserve of rich commuters and encourages the flight of poorer local people into the towns.

 

[Bantamzen]

I think you have just proved my point. The Internet is the communication system, originally used by people with computers... which is/was a completely decentralised system of computing power and data storage.

What you are describing is the way that big business has reacted to get control back -r you could say to exploit an opportunity that they have spotted. They "relieve" users of the need for their own storage and even computing power by providing it... and getting complete control, using a publicly funded communications network as far as I can see.
I abandoned MS Word because I found that I couldn't create a document unless it started life in their "cloud."
Using home power storage you can either let the companies run the import/export if you trust them, or you can control it yourself if you can be bothered to look at the next day's predicted prices and your expected electricity needs and set your system accordingly.

The vast majority of data consumed by the vast majority of users is not stored locally. You may feel you are "winning" by not using cloud services, but you're not. Just as with the internet, local EV storage will be not be controlled by individual users, or small communes of like minded people in a narco-syndicous commune, taking it in turn to act as a sort of officer for the week, with all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting, by a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs...

As said, I think we have totally different ideas of what a suitable philosophy for running the country is.

I haven't been talking about a suitable philosophy for running the country, just how things will pan out. I just an old realist.

 

[ChrisC]

Of course one size doesn't fit all. There will aways be journeys for which private transport is the only realistic solution. But any civilised society ought to enable the majority of journeys for the majority of people to be made by frequent and efficient public transport*. And before anyone says 'think of the cost', the key word is efficient. The more investment is put into reliable systems now the cheaper they will cost to run and and less damage to the environment in all sorts of ways.

*at least in urban areas. Rural ones have their own problems but over-reliance on private transport risks turning the countryside into the preserve of rich commuters and encourages the flight of poorer local people into the towns.

For many journeys private transport is the only realistic solution because there are no direct public transport routes between many towns and in some cases even cities. You only have to realise how it isn't possible to travel east to west by rail north of London. The current lack of a railway east of Bedford is a good example.

Rail lines run in and out of London, like spokes on a wheel, with very few links between them. At a more localised level bus services are often like that serving most of our major cities. People can travel into and out of the nearest city fairly easily by bus, but to travel to a neighbouring town, just a few miles away, it often means travelling considerable distances into a city and out again.

Returning to the original title of the thread. We should be making public transport as widely available as is practically possible to and encouraging people to use it to cut the carbon footprint. There will always be some very remote rural areas where this will never be practical or possible. There are too many sizeable market towns which now have no evening or Sunday buses and many quite large villages which have no useable bus service at all.

Many current bus services have become so tedious to use because they run such roundabout and indirect routes. People are not going to choose to travel on a bus for up to a hour for a journey that can be done in 15 minutes by car. Whilst it is important that people have access to bus routes they can’t run to everyone’s front door! Too many buses are diverting off the main roads to serve every part of every housing estate, industrial estate and retail park. Some of these deviations are to run through locations only 5 minutes walk from the main road and yet cause big delays to buses, especially at peak times, when they have to turn right to get back onto the main road. In addition to the added journey times and delays it also adds to the amount of fuel being used.

 

[miklcct]

Yet there is a station with a frequent train service three minutes walk away, and frequent buses not much further. This scenario is replicated in maybe the majority of suburban and inner city streets all over the country.

Can you state which town is this?

Perhaps the train does not go where the residents need to be, at the times they have to travel?

I have the great benefit of free travel on both train and bus, yet when I visit my daughter I drive. Why? Because it takes less than 40 minutes, door to door, at whatever time I want to leave and return, and I can carry as much as I need to in the car. The same journey by public transport involves two buses and two trains, or two walks, one quite long, in whatever the weather was doing, and two trains; And would take well over two hours - each way. No matter what is invested in improving public transport it will never be a viable or realistic alternative to the car for such a journey, and many others.

I last bought a car 3 years ago, and an electric vehicle would actually have suited me; But not at the cost of £10,000 more! If however, the price of electric vehicles was at or close to that of petrol/diesel models, I would be quite happy to electrify; Charging at home would not be a problem, elsewhere might however. This of course disregards the issues of national electricity supply, battery manufacture, safety, disposal, etc.....

This is a failure of your public transport network, provided that you and your daughter live in urban areas.

For many journeys private transport is the only realistic solution because there are no direct public transport routes between many towns and in some cases even cities. You only have to realise how it isn't possible to travel east to west by rail north of London. The current lack of a railway east of Bedford is a good example.

This is a failure of the public transport network. In my opinion, a good public transport network should have attractive linkage between each and every neighbouring towns, comparable to the standard between St Albans and Hatfield.

Rail lines run in and out of London, like spokes on a wheel, with very few links between them. At a more localised level bus services are often like that serving most of our major cities. People can travel into and out of the nearest city fairly easily by bus, but to travel to a neighbouring town, just a few miles away, it often means travelling considerable distances into a city and out again.

This is another failure of the public transport network. The bus should start from the city and call everywhere on the most direct road until the neighbouring town, and you should be able to take an orbital bus service from your suburb to where the interurban bus serves.

Many current bus services have become so tedious to use because they run such roundabout and indirect routes. People are not going to choose to travel on a bus for up to a hour for a journey that can be done in 15 minutes by car. Whilst it is important that people have access to bus routes they can’t run to everyone’s front door! Too many buses are diverting off the main roads to serve every part of every housing estate, industrial estate and retail park. Some of these deviations are to run through locations only 5 minutes walk from the main road and yet cause big delays to buses, especially at peak times, when they have to turn right to get back onto the main road. In addition to the added journey times and delays it also adds to the amount of fuel being used.

What is the reason of this? Isn't this supposed to be prevented under a deregulated, commercial operating environment as the operators have incentive to run buses to attract as many riders as possible?

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

The strike price for Hinkley Point was £89.50/MWh at 2013 prices, indexed to Consumer Price Index, so will be way over that figure by now. Inflation makes EV energy storage even more attractive, as long as people can still afford the EVs, as there is virtually no other spend required.

You will need a cleverer inverter that can work both ways and it will need to tied to a comms network but doubt it will cost that much more as the electronics are pretty standard now. There is then the issue of cycling the battery more frequently so would need to balance that off against degrading the battery prematurely.

Attempting to wrench this thread back towards topic, grid storage won't really work with battery trains and buses, as they are probably in use when the grid needs the energy back. But they can save money and CO2 by making use of surplus renewable electricity to charge overnight.

Indeed battery powered public transport vehicles will be operating 16-18hrs/day and need to be fully recharged by the start of the next days duty so agree unlikely they will be any use of V2G schemes. Also many bus garage installations are constrained on power they can take from local DNO so can't charge all the fleet simultaneously.

 

[talldave]

A slight aside on the topic of supplier desperation to get smart meters in - for the last year I've been offered a free coffee for having smart meters installed in their monthly begging letters. This week they've upped the stakes to a free coffee and £100 off my bill. Holding out looks to be the most profitable option .

On the subject of blackouts, are the EV owners going to be as disappointed as solar panel owners to discover that they have no energy during a power cut, or does the bidirectional EV charging kit isolate the EV from the grid if the grid goes down, so that the EV owner can run the house off the car?

 

[AndrewE]

A slight aside on the topic of supplier desperation to get smart meters in - for the last year I've been offered a free coffee for having smart meters installed in their monthly begging letters. This week they've upped the stakes to a free coffee and £100 off my bill. Holding out looks to be the most profitable option .

On the subject of blackouts, are the EV owners going to be as disappointed as solar panel owners to discover that they have no energy during a power cut, or does the bidirectional EV charging kit isolate the EV from the grid if the grid goes down, so that the EV owner can run the house off the car?

That depends on the make and functionality of your inverter, if you don't go cheap and nasty but pay a bit more (e.g. Victron) it is a fundamental part of the system. You do need the equipment to be sure that you are not going to energise the mains and electrocute their people, but many systems are designed to have UPS capability.

Indeed battery powered public transport vehicles will be operating 16-18hrs/day and need to be fully recharged by the start of the next days duty so agree unlikely they will be any use of V2G schemes. Also many bus garage installations are constrained on power they can take from local DNO so can't charge all the fleet simultaneously.

I disagree. Dust lorries are probably a lost cause, but buses on defined routes should be no problem: see Harrogate, also https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/p...art-of-the-capital-s-journey-to-zero-emission

From next year, a further extension of 'opportunity charging', with pantographs conveniently located at each end of a bus route, will be trialled in another first for London. The 15-mile route 358 between Crystal Palace and Orpington is one of London's longest. A standard garage charge alone would not sustain a zero-emission bus the entire day. Due to the length of the route, a pantograph at each end of the route, rather than back at the garage, will mean buses receive a quick boost on the spot. With minimal turnaround time, fewer buses can again provide the same level of service.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

I disagree. Dust lorries are probably a lost cause, but buses on defined routes should be no problem: see Harrogate, also https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/p...art-of-the-capital-s-journey-to-zero-emission

The TfL item reinforces that batteries really need to be fully charged overnight on cheaper electricity otherwise they will be topping up with expensive electricity a lot of the time let alone extra infrastructure needed. The 358 still has started running the new electric buses either.

 

[Falcon1200]

This is a failure of your public transport network, provided that you and your daughter live in urban areas.

Not really, the number of people wishing to travel between the two locations is so small that there never has been and never will be any justification for providing a better, or any direct, public transport link.

(The two places are the towns of Neilston and Largs, West Scotland)

 

[coppercapped]

Of course one size doesn't fit all. There will aways be journeys for which private transport is the only realistic solution. But any civilised society ought to enable the majority of journeys for the majority of people to be made by frequent and efficient public transport*. And before anyone says 'think of the cost', the key word is efficient. The more investment is put into reliable systems now the cheaper they will cost to run and and less damage to the environment in all sorts of ways.

*at least in urban areas. Rural ones have their own problems but over-reliance on private transport risks turning the countryside into the preserve of rich commuters and encourages the flight of poorer local people into the towns.

Poorer local people (in the countryside) have been moving to towns and cities since time immemorial, or at least since the growth of Ur of the Chaldees...

In the UK countryside to urban migrations were already noticeable in the medieval times driven by poor living conditions, acute unemployment and low pay - all results of a subsistence economy. Towns grow because transaction costs are lower than in an area with a widely spread population. None of this has anything to do with an over-reliance on private transport - in fact private transport makes it possible for the countryside to support a population that is not directly employed in it.

 

[urbophile]

Poorer local people (in the countryside) have been moving to towns and cities since time immemorial, or at least since the growth of Ur of the Chaldees...

In the UK countryside to urban migrations were already noticeable in the medieval times driven by poor living conditions, acute unemployment and low pay - all results of a subsistence economy. Towns grow because transaction costs are lower than in an area with a widely spread population. None of this has anything to do with an over-reliance on private transport - in fact private transport makes it possible for the countryside to support a population that is not directly employed in it.

Your general picture is accurate. But how can the problem not be exacerbated when young people in villages or small towns can't get transport out of them, for work or leisure? Or when old people who might otherwise have taken regular trips out for shopping or meeting friends, are stuck at home?