You can smear that out because not everyone will plug in at exactly the same moment, but if a third of the cars are charging at once, that's 36GW - which is around half the UK's current peak capacity of 75GW.
You can design trade-offs, where a lower charge current - 13A would be ideal - takes longer, but then you get into all kinds of interesting situations where people can be marooned at remote destinations or trapped at home waiting for their cars to charge.
You can also enforce off-peak charging, which might solve the capacity problem, but can create similar difficulties for those times when someone needs transport immediately.
Also - cost and complication. And security. Not everyone has a garage. Whether you charge at 50A or 13A, you're going to have mains cables poking out of houses and running across pavements - extra fun when it rains. And good luck trying to park more than 10m from your home. Or streets will have to be rewired with charging points and some kind of billing system.
And so on. It's not a simple 'Let's go electric.' There are some serious practical issues to solve before electric driving becomes a realistic alternative.
So there has to be a push, either in the form of government subsidy, or in much lower prices, before people will accept these restrictions. I suspect many consumers who can afford to will continue to pay an insane petrol tax, and won't sit down and do a comparative calculation to see how much they could save unless someone holds a gun to their heads.
I used to live in a flat in a Gergian terrace with - almost uniquely for Bath - plenty of parking space outside.
How would I recharge my car? With a long lead out of a window?
And let's not think too hard what happens if someone has visitors over. If they all want to recharge overnight, how is that going to work? What happens if someone can't find a socket and needs to be at work tomorrow?
You can't just swap to electric cars overnight - you need to replace the current petrol distribution infrastructure with something equivalent. Which is not a small job.
Aside from generation, some areas won't have enough local distribution capacity, and you have to solve that final connection problem. Putting pavement level sockets in front of a terrace for a couple of hundred cars wouldn't be cheap or simple - never mind working out a billing system that works fairly. The sockets would have to be everywhere that cars park regularly, otherwise people and cars will be stranded.
Once you add security and accounting, it turns into an impressively untrivial and very much uncheap country-sized project.
You can either go down that route, or you can keep the existing infrastructure and replace it with industrial high-current filling stations which can recharge a car in a few minutes. But then you need a kA delivery and battery system, and that technology isn't available yet.
So the best you can hope for from the current state of the art is some mitigation for the middle classes and upwards, who have garages and will be able to pay for the extra installation costs. It will take some pressure off petrol prices, but it's not - yet - a realistic alternative.
This ties in with "stranded wind", and liquid fuels as an energy vector.
Norway's Norsk Hydro "fixed" nitrates from cheap
hydro power
since 1907.
I'm sure I read somwhere recently about some US academic who has invented a new process for fixing CO2 and H2O into hydrocarbons with a great deal of potential for getting the costs right down.
The cost of synthetic hydrocarbons should essentially place a "cap" on non-renewables.
Except for the delay in building the industrial plant to manufacture the synthfuels. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
If they all want to recharge overnight, how is that going to work?
I've been having some talks with my local housing organization board or however you translate it (ie the elected board running the finances of the building) after I moved in about were I could recharge my electric scooter. We found a couple of outlets on a wall and it worked out fine.
Now, the good thing is that this got my good neighbours (ie the board) thinking: what are they going to do when everyone else in the house starts buying electrics and plug-in hybrids?
So they are already looking at the capacity of the wires, and where to put the outlets and so on. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
A typical car is going to need at least 3KW, and possibly 30kW if you want a much faster charging time.
So this will work for scooters, but not for cars.
You absolutely won't need 30 kW as trickle charge would be the thing. A full charge could take 8 hours without creating a fuss.
If a PHEV will have a battery of 10 kWh and a true electric 30 kWh (WAG's), 1.25 kW and 3.75 kW respectively would suffice.
For fast charging (like 10-15 minutes) three phase power at a filling station would be the reasonable alternative.
Such a filling station would need some really impressive power lines by the way. Say you want to be able to charge six 30 kWh electrics at the same time, in 15 minutes. Then you'd need 0.72 MW's. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
It's not the cost of the cars, it's the cost of the infrastructure.
I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of the new cars will be a magnitude, or two(!) bigger than that of the new infrastructure. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Who pays for the electricity you use if you plug yourself into it?
There are around a hundred parking spaces in front of the terrace I mentioned, and maybe another thirty spaces around the back. At 13A that's an extra distribution capacity of around 400kVA.
I don't know how much it costs to upgrade a distribution transformer, but I'd guess it's at least equivalent to a handful of cars. Then add a billing and accounting system, and it's Not Simple.
Eventually as everyone get these things and charge cars instead of scooters, it will become a relevant cost.
But if you look at the picture of the outlet, it has a lock. Only with the right key can it be used. And measuring the consumption should not be hard. After all, it is probably already done somehow. Or possibly you can use as much power as you want when you manage to get hold of one of the leased parking spots, which all have these outlets. The you also get the key.
All household power consumption data in this city is remotely measured and sent directly to the power company. I don't know if they use the internet, the GSM net or even the power lines themselves, but somehow they do it. But I guess you could play around a little with the wires and software and integrate the heaters into this system, if it's not already done. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
But if everyone is charging their vehicles, then it can still be a shared cost. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
Car ownership in that terrace isn't more than 50%, so it's going to be hard to persuade the other 50% that they should share the cost.
Putting pavement level sockets in front of a terrace for a couple of hundred cars wouldn't be cheap or simple - never mind working out a billing system that works fairly. The sockets would have to be everywhere that cars park regularly, otherwise people and cars will be stranded.
Having some experience in contracting I can say that such a prospect would set Consulting Electrical Engineers and Electrical Contractors to drooling. Electrifying your 200 car lot would be simple in an underground or indoor lot. Buried utilities in an outdoor lot would be more expensive. I used to figure $100/foot for concrete encased underground conduit. Line the cars up nose to nose on 10' centers and you would have 1000' of trench.
More likely, folks would learn to love the sight of painted, exposed galvanized, rigid conduit for a fraction of that price. With an exposed installation time to install would probably be well less than a month. Such a project on a nationwide scale would definitely stimulate the economy. It would be a good time to be an electrical contractor. It ain't rocket science.
Designing a metering system that would accommodate time of day dependent rates and that could read I.D. codes embedded in the electric vehicle and in a card carried by the user is mostly a problem of selecting and getting agreement on standards. Were conduit laid out to accommodate a full allotment of 200 vehicles, wire and metering devices could be added as demand builds. This would allow time to upgrade the distribution infrastructure as required. I have seen estimates that existing generating capacity would suffice for charging cars were the load shifted to minimum load hours, such as 12:00-5:00 AM. If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.
I don't think you can run exposed conduits here, because most of these installations won't be in lots, they'll be on pavements. You can't run conduits across pavements without turning them into an obstacle course. So they'd have to be suspended or run underground. £100/ft might be reasonable in the UK. The terrace is maybe 600ft long, and you'd need access points on both sides of the street. Let's call it 1000ft in total.
£100k, not including metering - for one terrace, with a few hundred people living in it. Scale that to the entire city and the total is upwards of £100m.
Now - you could make people pay for the installation, but it's going to add a £2k-£3k premium to the price of the car, and you may get a mess if you do things that way.
Top down £100m wouldn't be impossible, but it would need some serious cheerleading from both local and national government. Bath wasted £35m (!) getting a showcase spa project finished, but councils are usually less keen to spend money on essential infrastructure than on giant white elephant projects.
Either way it's something that has to be organised - there are only so many electric cars you can sell to people with garages, and if you want ordinary people to start using them, the transition is going to cost money.
