[midasuni]

In the U.K. the average car does less than 30 miles a day. Charging overnight would require a draw off less than 1kW. Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone. My shower this morning was nearer 10kW.

[uc_banana]

>Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone.

Indeed. When people's kettle usage was much more synchronised (ie, when TV advert breaks were a shared experience by most people), they had to build a power station just to cover this scenario (Dinorwic pumped storage). "Power station" is also quite generous, as it is only storage, and therefore is a net loss to the power grid.

Even the most optimistic person has to admit that there's a limit to what can be done spread the additional load of 40 million EVs each needing to charge ~10kWh per day without grid upgrades and investment.

[midasuni]

Except the grid can cope with peak usage into peoples housing when the ovens are on etc.

Sure you may need some more power stations, but the actual capacity for the wires, substations etc can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.

[uc_banana]

>can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.

Not necessarily. At the scale of the national grid, a kettle is a very short-term load. I can't imagine that it would go well if 30 million homes decided to leave their ovens on all night.

[0_____0]

As a USian who uses my kettle multiple times a day I'm a bit jealous of your fast boiling kettles. It can take minutes to boil a full kettle at our measly 1.5kW limit.

Just checked. 7 minutes 30 seconds to boil 1.7L :(

[ajb]

A lot of people in the UK use on street parking. You're not allowed to run a wire across the footpath even if you happen to get the spot outside your house. The current plan seems to be to make every lamppost into a slow charger, but that wouldn't be enough for everyone to replace their petrol vehicle.

[midasuni]

Most people don’t though. In England it’s 68% of homes that either have or have potential for off street parking

https://www.racfoundation.org/research/mobility/still-standi...

[ajb]

32% is still a big number to deal with. Government can't just write off that many car owners.

[midasuni]

They wrote off 48% just fine and seem to have been rewarded.