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If every non-electric vehicle currently in the UK became an electric car, lorry, bus, train, etc (ie powered by on-board batteries recharged from the national grid or powered directly from the grid) with the same power and covering the same annual mileage (assuming adequate batteries and other technology to be available), is it possible to estimate the total additional electrical power requirement? How would this compare with total current (pardon the pun) electrical power consumption? To how many new coal fired power stations (eg Drax) or new nuclear fission power stations (eg Sizewell) would this equate? Alternately, to how many wind turbines would this equate at present levels of their efficiency? I am ignoring solar panels built into vehicles, or elsewhere, for the moment, and tidal as being insignificant. Hydrogen has too many problems (but anyway this is just another way of transporting the power from the generator to the vehicle) and nuclear fusion is 40 years away (perhaps always 40 years away as the old joke goes).

Badger4 Thurs 02/10/08 21:30

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Panic Button
Thurs 02/10/08
22:17

I don't think current technology is capable of producing a viable battery powered lorry, bus or train.

eltelioni
Fri 03/10/08
09:20

The question is how much extra generating power we would need. Is it 50% more, or 2x or 10x. I don't have a clue, but would also be interested to know.

jake-the-peg
Fri 03/10/08
10:19

A lot of work to do exactly as you'd need to break down by type of vehicle.

But we used 560 million tonnes of Carbon which I make approximately 90 billion litres of petrol/diesel let's be daft and assume everybody gets 10Km per litre that's 9 billion Km.

the Tesla motors sports car is probably the most advanced car today and it does 220 miles (350Km) between charges. and takes 56KWhr to charge.

So we have an estimate of about 1.5 billion KWhrs extra. So say 200 million KW extra

Which is about 200 extra Sizewells

Now there's a lot of silly assumptions there

We've assumed all little sports cars and no lorries and ignored transmission losses. But we've also neglected the fact that most charging is overnight when generation capacity is underused.

Remember too that making such calculations at this point is like Edwardians calculating petrol requirements and saying the internal combustion engine will never catch on.

One final point about Fusion - It may be 40 years away but it is the only scalable long term energy proposal and it is now progressing.

Jet achieved ignition and ITER in France will achieve Breakeven. Finally DEMO - Probably in Japan will be the first power station in about 40 years for more see

http://www.iter.org

Badger4
Sun 05/10/08
17:20

Question Author

Thank you to all for your answers. If I may clarify, I am totally in favour of electric vehicles as being the only possible solution when the oil runs out or becomes too expensive to burn. In my view, rechargeable vehicles are more likely than hydrogen powered vehicles, given the problems with the infrastructure, distribution and storage of hydrogen. However, as I said earlier, either is only one method of transferring the power from the generator to the vehicle and my question was really about the increase in generating capacity which would be necessary.

I fully accept that the answer that approximately 200 Sizewells would be required is only a broad brush calculation with a lot of assumptions but it gives an idea of the order of magnitude of the issue.

Given that we cannot rely on imported power, it will have to be nuclear (fusion and/or fission), no matter what the Green Party may say. However, have we left it too late?

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