But I've seen this on so called eco estates.
Each house has 2 panels (800w max) and a piddly little battery just so the builder can tick the box for the lowest possible cost.
Electric cars.
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Each house has 2 panels (800w max) and a piddly little battery just so the builder can tick the box for the lowest possible cost.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
However I do carefully add up the total wattage and ensure it never exceeds 10amps.
I have an 8 gang extension in my office that powers my pc, 3 monitors, usb dock, speakers, back up NAS drive and laptop dock. If everything pulls full power it comes to 1200w, so plenty of headroom.
Similar situation in my living room for my fish tank, but that's a 6 gang socket.
And I am good and they are both fused with built in surge protection and RCD thingy.
But I get what you mean
As for new builds, it should be minimum spec of 4kw solar for any semi or detached house with minimum of 6kw battery and maybe a bit smaller for terraced. It's easy enough to write in to building regs for all councils to adopt and mandate.
Flats is a different matter, as that's more difficult to legislate for, but you could easily say x% of roof space and battery that's 2x solar output and have it wired in to the building primary junction.
We do use them but we checked to make sure they are no where near overloaded.
Try your set up here -
https://www.electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/safety-around-the-home/overloading-sockets/
More worrying would be to power than from a 50ft extension lead still coiled on its spool.
It makes an excellent induction heater & will melt the insulations in no time.
It makes an excellent induction heater & will melt the insulations in no time.
If politicians grew a set and mandated proper insulation in all new builds and renovations that would make a real difference, part of the issue is the change to combi boilers most took out the cold water storage tank and the hot water cylinder. I know in my house this space is now built into rooms so to change would cost significantly more.
I agree if a large scale move to put modest batteries in homes where suitable could work if linked to a genuine smart system that draws from the batteries when needed and recharges when surplus produced. If done on scale could be a better and safer option than the battery farms, with upside of lowering consumers bills slightly when the charge at off peak prices
I agree if a large scale move to put modest batteries in homes where suitable could work if linked to a genuine smart system that draws from the batteries when needed and recharges when surplus produced. If done on scale could be a better and safer option than the battery farms, with upside of lowering consumers bills slightly when the charge at off peak prices
We installed a 16kw battery bank and just over 6 kW solar panels 3 months ago. We also have an EV.Octopus control my battery and take power at peak rates and recharge at low rates.
Our total last month bill for gas and electricity for our 4 bedroom house was £11.62.
I'm happy with that.
Our total last month bill for gas and electricity for our 4 bedroom house was £11.62.
I'm happy with that.
This is my point if this was adopted on a larger scale could reduce consumer bills and ease pressure on the grid a win win, to an extent could do the same with EV batteries those who are able to plug in during the day and night if the ability to use their batteries it could be a game changer
Alas there are no industry standards yet to make this easy.
My inverter & batteries are not on the Octopus supported list.
Also some ev/EV chargers allow you to use a proportion of the cars battery to do this too.
Chinese car maker Zeekr says its new electric vehicle (EV) batteries charge faster than any of its rivals, including industry leaders Tesla and BYD.
The firm claims its upgraded batteries can be charged from 10% to 80% capacity in 10 and a half minutes using its ultra-fast charging stations.
In comparison, Elon Musk’s Tesla says a 15 minute charge allows its Model 3 to cover 175 miles (282km), a little under half the car’s full range.
Zeekr's 2025 007 sedan, which will be available from next week, will be its first vehicle to have the new battery.
The battery performs well even in cold weather charging from 10% to 80% of its capacity in less than half an hour at temperatures as low as -10C, the company also said, external.
BBC News has contacted Tesla and BYD to request a response to Zeekr's announcement.
Tu Le, founder and managing director of consultancy firm Sino Auto Insights told the BBC: "Tesla’s charging technology is not industry leading anymore and has not been for some time."
"These bold claims by Zeekr are believable, but more importantly even if it’s not the fastest charging EV battery, being one for the fastest is still quite a leap for them".
"The competition in China is incredibly fierce and while brands like BYD prioritise scale and sales, brands like Zeekr, Li [Auto] and Nio are focused on maximising the charging experience," said Mark Rainford, a China-based car industry commentator.
"Zeekr's parent company, Geely, is pretty much a vertically integrated business... they have the resources to do this," he added.
Geely owns several brands, including UK-based luxury sports car brand Lotus and Sweden's Volvo.
In May, Zeekr's shares started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, marking the first major US market debut by a Chinese company since 2021.
The shares are currently trading 27% below the price set in its initial public offering (IPO).
The listing came just days before the Biden administration announced major tariff hikes on Chinese-made electric cars, solar panels, steel and other goods.
The White House said the measures, which included a 100% border tax on EVs from China, were a response to unfair policies and intended to protect US jobs.
Officials in the US, the European Union and other major car markets have grown increasingly concerned about the rapid overseas expansion of Chinese EV companies.
The firm claims its upgraded batteries can be charged from 10% to 80% capacity in 10 and a half minutes using its ultra-fast charging stations.
In comparison, Elon Musk’s Tesla says a 15 minute charge allows its Model 3 to cover 175 miles (282km), a little under half the car’s full range.
Zeekr's 2025 007 sedan, which will be available from next week, will be its first vehicle to have the new battery.
The battery performs well even in cold weather charging from 10% to 80% of its capacity in less than half an hour at temperatures as low as -10C, the company also said, external.
BBC News has contacted Tesla and BYD to request a response to Zeekr's announcement.
Tu Le, founder and managing director of consultancy firm Sino Auto Insights told the BBC: "Tesla’s charging technology is not industry leading anymore and has not been for some time."
"These bold claims by Zeekr are believable, but more importantly even if it’s not the fastest charging EV battery, being one for the fastest is still quite a leap for them".
"The competition in China is incredibly fierce and while brands like BYD prioritise scale and sales, brands like Zeekr, Li [Auto] and Nio are focused on maximising the charging experience," said Mark Rainford, a China-based car industry commentator.
"Zeekr's parent company, Geely, is pretty much a vertically integrated business... they have the resources to do this," he added.
Geely owns several brands, including UK-based luxury sports car brand Lotus and Sweden's Volvo.
In May, Zeekr's shares started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, marking the first major US market debut by a Chinese company since 2021.
The shares are currently trading 27% below the price set in its initial public offering (IPO).
The listing came just days before the Biden administration announced major tariff hikes on Chinese-made electric cars, solar panels, steel and other goods.
The White House said the measures, which included a 100% border tax on EVs from China, were a response to unfair policies and intended to protect US jobs.
Officials in the US, the European Union and other major car markets have grown increasingly concerned about the rapid overseas expansion of Chinese EV companies.
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I assume this is the base model with a range of 427 miles CLTP, there's also a version with higher-capacity but slower-charging batteries that can do 540 miles. 10-80% of 427 miles is 299 miles in 10.5 minutes. And in China prices start at the equivalent of £22.4k....
https://www.zeekrglobal.com/posts/the-zeekr-007-a-smart-electric-sedan-is-officially-launched
It's not a wonder they don't want them in countries that make their own EVs
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More a case that a lot of Chinese manufacturers are heavily subsidised by the state so that they can undercut foreign competitors and keep them out of both the local market in China as well as going to other markets and undercutting them there too, forcing them out of business so that everything we buy is made in China and they can obtain world domination through the back door.
That said, 800V charging is some serious power and must take some equally serious infrastructure to back it up.
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You're mixing up a bunch of stuff here - petrol, electricity and gas have very different markets. I think we may be violently agreeing on some points but it's not terribly clear what your argument is.
Seriously, if you look at the charts of gas prices between different countries, UK electricity prices were pretty average until the invasion of Ukraine, but since then they have been among the - if not actually the - most expensive in Europe. And that's because a) all our electricity is priced at the cost of the marginal kWh and b) the UK is pretty much unique in having the marginal kWh always coming from gas, whereas in the EU the marginal kWh comes from gas only 39% of the time and in Scandinavia it's only 1% of the time. So when the price of gas goes up 10x, our electricity market is screwed.
As for tax and levies - it depends. Petrol is about 55% (52.95p/litre plus 20% VAT), so still nowhere near 80%. In 2023H2 :
Gas averaged 7.7p/kWh of which 1.09p/kWh was tax/levies (so 14% tax)
Electricity was 36.07p and 9.37p respectively (so 26% tax)
Renewables are not the problem in general. There are wind farms that operate completely outside the subsidy system, on the free market. Gordon Brown developed a massively complicated system that ran from 2002 to 2014 that made open-ended guarantees of subsidy regardless of the market price. Those early generators have been making out like bandits during the Ukraine crisis, and have been a drain on the system.
In 2014 Ed Davey introduced a new system (partly to avoid EU rules on subsidies) where generators had to bid for a fixed price they would be paid by a government-owned company. This works pretty well for things like windfarms and solar as almost all the cost is up front and paid for by debt, so it suits them to be paid a fixed price. The government company then takes on the market risk, so effectively when market prices are low it is paying the generator a subsidy of the difference between the contract price and the market price - but when prices are higher, they take the extra profit for themselves. This has worked pretty well during the Ukraine crisis to the extent that at times the entire "subsidy" system (including the open-ended deals) was turning a profit. And that's excluding the £1bn+ licence fees that companies have been paying just for access to the seabed for offshore windfarms.
Prices bottomed in the 2021 round, higher interest rates have pushed up prices a bit (and they are inflation-indexed in a rather complicated way) but to give you an idea in the last auction round, if they were operating in 2024, there was :
3.3GW of solar bid at £70/MWh
1GW of onshore wind at £71/MWh
3.4GW offshore wind at £82/MWh
0.4GW of floating wind at £195/MWh
0.028GW of tidal at £239/MWh
Hinkley Point C is on the same system, 3.2GW at £129/MWh if it was running in 2024 (although it may be increased).
For comparison the current market price is about £80/MWh, so for these new projects solar and onshore wind are paying back "anti-subsidy", offshore wind is roughly market price, and it's only the new technologies like floating wind and tidal, that need subsidy, but we're building them at much smaller scale. Yes there are some historical contracts with huge subsidies built in, but they are expiring. Oh and then there's our only new nuclear plant.
For grid storage they are more expensive up front, but generally have much better round-trip efficiencies than converting electricity to hydrogen/methanol/e-fuel. So they're great for storing energy for the early evening peak each day, but they don't really work for big long-term storage to cover a week without wind. Whereas hydrogen is more suited to that case, it's more expensive per unit of energy but that's OK when you only use it a few times a year, but it's cheaper to store in bulk. And a lot of that "energy for renewables that you're already dumping" won't be there, as it will be used to green the hydrogen already used by the economy, it will need about 10% of current UK electricity production just to green our existing hydrogen use, and then more will be sucked up by the chemical industry etc to replace other fossil fuel products.
And what happened recently? Russia's invasion of Ukraine, panicking European gas markets and vastly increasing demand and hence prices for liquified natural gas(LNG). Which was a particular problem for the UK as we had been net exporters of gas until just over 20 years ago, but had declined to build gas storage like every other European country because we thought we could always buy gas on the LNG market if we had a problem with gas supply.
Seriously, if you look at the charts of gas prices between different countries, UK electricity prices were pretty average until the invasion of Ukraine, but since then they have been among the - if not actually the - most expensive in Europe. And that's because a) all our electricity is priced at the cost of the marginal kWh and b) the UK is pretty much unique in having the marginal kWh always coming from gas, whereas in the EU the marginal kWh comes from gas only 39% of the time and in Scandinavia it's only 1% of the time. So when the price of gas goes up 10x, our electricity market is screwed.
As for tax and levies - it depends. Petrol is about 55% (52.95p/litre plus 20% VAT), so still nowhere near 80%. In 2023H2 :
Gas averaged 7.7p/kWh of which 1.09p/kWh was tax/levies (so 14% tax)
Electricity was 36.07p and 9.37p respectively (so 26% tax)
Renewables are not the problem in general. There are wind farms that operate completely outside the subsidy system, on the free market. Gordon Brown developed a massively complicated system that ran from 2002 to 2014 that made open-ended guarantees of subsidy regardless of the market price. Those early generators have been making out like bandits during the Ukraine crisis, and have been a drain on the system.
In 2014 Ed Davey introduced a new system (partly to avoid EU rules on subsidies) where generators had to bid for a fixed price they would be paid by a government-owned company. This works pretty well for things like windfarms and solar as almost all the cost is up front and paid for by debt, so it suits them to be paid a fixed price. The government company then takes on the market risk, so effectively when market prices are low it is paying the generator a subsidy of the difference between the contract price and the market price - but when prices are higher, they take the extra profit for themselves. This has worked pretty well during the Ukraine crisis to the extent that at times the entire "subsidy" system (including the open-ended deals) was turning a profit. And that's excluding the £1bn+ licence fees that companies have been paying just for access to the seabed for offshore windfarms.
Prices bottomed in the 2021 round, higher interest rates have pushed up prices a bit (and they are inflation-indexed in a rather complicated way) but to give you an idea in the last auction round, if they were operating in 2024, there was :
3.3GW of solar bid at £70/MWh
1GW of onshore wind at £71/MWh
3.4GW offshore wind at £82/MWh
0.4GW of floating wind at £195/MWh
0.028GW of tidal at £239/MWh
Hinkley Point C is on the same system, 3.2GW at £129/MWh if it was running in 2024 (although it may be increased).
For comparison the current market price is about £80/MWh, so for these new projects solar and onshore wind are paying back "anti-subsidy", offshore wind is roughly market price, and it's only the new technologies like floating wind and tidal, that need subsidy, but we're building them at much smaller scale. Yes there are some historical contracts with huge subsidies built in, but they are expiring. Oh and then there's our only new nuclear plant.
Imports come and go - in 2022 we were big exporters of electricity to Europe (partly to fill in for the low capacity factors of unreliable French nuclear reactors), in 2023 it swung back the other way. Either way they're imports - either import directly via interconnectors, or burn imported gas in our own power stations. It's still imported energy either way, it just depends on what is cheapest at the time.
Not many people would defend the Drax wood pellets, I certainly won't. But I would note that it's only about 4% of UK electricity production, and the grid people love having a big dispatchable resource in the right geographical location to stabilise the whole UK network.
I don't really get your point here, you seem to be conflating the one-off manufacturing of equipment with the ongoing need for fuel. For instance an EV may need more upfront materials, but it breaks even in CO2 terms after around 15-20,000 miles. A heat pump breaks even after 12-15 months. And so on. The inefficiencies and the total amounts are not the same.
But energy density is just not a big factor in the overall scheme of things, certainly not for grid storage. It's more critical for transport, particularly planes, but for vehicles (which is what this thread is about), current and near-future batteries generally provide enough range for 90+% of people.
For grid storage they are more expensive up front, but generally have much better round-trip efficiencies than converting electricity to hydrogen/methanol/e-fuel. So they're great for storing energy for the early evening peak each day, but they don't really work for big long-term storage to cover a week without wind. Whereas hydrogen is more suited to that case, it's more expensive per unit of energy but that's OK when you only use it a few times a year, but it's cheaper to store in bulk. And a lot of that "energy for renewables that you're already dumping" won't be there, as it will be used to green the hydrogen already used by the economy, it will need about 10% of current UK electricity production just to green our existing hydrogen use, and then more will be sucked up by the chemical industry etc to replace other fossil fuel products.
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Actually houses being largely self-sufficient makes things even more complicated for the grid - the total draw on the grid is less, but much *more* variable. Say your demand normally varies between 4kW and 10kW - your demand on the grid varies by 60%.
Then you install a 4kW solar panel/battery to take care of your personal "baseload". Then the grid sees your demand varying from 0-6kW, a 100% variation. And if there's cloud for a month, all the people who have been making no demand on the grid, suddenly all demand the right to run their entire house from grid supplies.
So no it doesn't make the grid's job much easier, although it's good in many other ways.
That's a bit of an over simplification, as panels vary with daylight.
For example overall, I generate as much from my panels in a year as I consume. But I export a lot of surplus in the summer, and import a lot in the winter.
Well it was like that last year,
but we've had so much gloom & rain this year I'm noticeably down on last year's numbers.
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MG dealers are offering some big reductions off list - brand new MG5 estate and MG4, both for under £20k :
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202408162947993
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202408203081328
Vauxhall are getting really desperate to hit the 22% EV target this year, list prices for Corsas and Astra have just had £5k knocked off them, I've heard of people negotiating much bigger discounts.
Meanwhile charger network is growing fast (courtesy of Zapmap)
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202408162947993
https://www.autotrader.co.uk/car-details/202408203081328
Vauxhall are getting really desperate to hit the 22% EV target this year, list prices for Corsas and Astra have just had £5k knocked off them, I've heard of people negotiating much bigger discounts.
Meanwhile charger network is growing fast (courtesy of Zapmap)
That MG5 is the long range one too. Amazing price!
Amazing deals if i had held off i could have has a brand new one! The price is subject being in certain employment tho if you read the small print. but still a really good deal.
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I also saw another MG - I guess the MG4 Extended range with a notional range of over 300 miles for £25k.
