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Just to show how far this whole battery thing is going... I'm lucky enough to have a boat that I've been bringing back to life whilst sailing. Its got an old Perkins diesel engine in it that is getting to the end of its life. Its now economically viable and practical to replace my diesel engine with electric propulsion using very similar batteries to the Pylontech ones I thought about for the house. There is a case study for a conversion here: https://electricyacht.com/conversion-stories/pleione-conversion/ . £15k or so to go all electric, I am seriously thinking about it.
Now imagine the same principle being applied to buses, camper vans, trucks, trains... I don't think most cars would be viable for retrofit at the moment as short life / relatively low value assets, but you get the point hopefully. If the economics are good enough for battery power retrofit to work on an old boat what else could they work on?
By the way, I know there are already electric trains, but anyone involved in the electrification of the west coast line will tell you fitting overhead cables is no fun. Imagine a train towing a tender carriage full of batteries... Would that be cheaper than a major infrastructure project for transmission lines?
I've just fitted solar, a power wall, and an (unrelated to this debate) and air source heat pump to my house. The house is a sprawling 1850s stone built 7 bedroom thing in the countryside.
I've now got a couple of months worth of data. Since installation I've drawn 91 KWh from the grid, exported 124 KWh back to the grid, used 451KWh in the house, and generated 524KWh from the solar. The numbers don't zero out for a number of reasons... mainly that the powerwall is now fully charged and was also fully charged before metering was switched on. My system is set up for solar only and not on a time base to draw down cheap charge overnight. Its the summer so the solar is doing ok, in winter power will be way down. The interesting bit for me is that the above is now just all my electric power, but hot water too, and again the heating has been off as it is summer!
In short over the summer months it has made my house a net exporter to the grid and removed the need to buy heating oil (no mains gas in the area) at all. I need a full year of data to properly work out the ROI, but I am also getting RHI for the heat generated via a government incentive scheme.
The power wall holds about 13.5KWh of usable power, but you can chain them together. You could also go the much cheaper route of using Pylontech batteries and 2.4-3.3KW/h capacity each, you can chain as many as six I believe.
This made sense for my type of house now, but would probably make sense for other house types at different points. Over 7 years I will be somewhere between £25 and £35k better off than using oil and conventional electricity including fully paying for the system.
I don't have an electric car yet, but with the current system I would have a 60KWh a month contribution to the electric running costs assuming I stopped exporting to the grid. I could obviously run it all another way to feed more to the car.
All of that involves a considerable amount of Nickel moving into my house and complete change in my personal power consumption.
djryan777 -
I am interested in your assertion that "its also about battery storage". As things stand the cost of running an EV vary significantly depending on the cost of electricity. EV's are interesting from a running cost point of view, but only if you can get cheap electricity. Based on my own experience (I pay 7.85p Night Elec / 13.68 Day Elec and charging at Tescos costs 24p per KWh). Charging on cheap electric is the key. In fact at 24p per KWh is currently the same cost as Diesel.
So my question is, in say ten years time when the will be more EVs (and more Wind Farms) - will there be any spare cheap electricity for your battery storage ? - Or will we all be paying 24p regardless on when we charge ?
Tesla has a company that totally recycled their end of life cells and reuse all the minerals cheaper than buying new at scale
They won’t. But there is an argument that car ownership will drop like a stone too, urban 18 year olds already don’t want a car as Uber does 90% plus of what they need one for at a fraction of the daily cost of insurance, road tax, depreciation and parking. Now if your question was how will personal transport work post carbon economy ... cities will likely be a mix of car pooling / ride sharing and public transport with some personal vehicle ownership, whilst in suburbia the mix will be the other way round. Out in the sticks personal vehicle ownership will likely continue as today but with mostly EV rather than ICE power.
Oh, and saying you can’t charge at home because you live in a terraced house is like not that much different to saying ‘I can’t put petrol in my car at home’ , imagine the shift was happening the other way round. When there is a reason people find a way.
Bottom line is for a lot of people it will be about cost, then convenience, and then the planet. If it costs 1/5 of ICE to run an electric car how long before everyone wants one and will happily find a way? Mile for mile that difference is almost there now, just not everyone can afford a brand new car and numbers in the second hand market aren’t big enough yet to matter
Hi JA
I am pleased that you like the idea of electrified transport, you do seem to be woefully unaware of how the electricity grid works. Essentially the electricity has be produced as it is being used and as we all know usage is not stable there are peaks and troughs which gives the producers quite a headache and results in the grid having a lot more capacity than it normally needs just to meet peak demand; they even have peaker power stations for this. Most EV users charge up their vehicles in the early morning on cheap tariff electricity which actually helps producers use power that they have which nobody else wants. London is not the UK and there are solutions to powering EVs on terraced streets from lamp post chargers to induction chargers. I suggest that you look up Plug Life on You Tube where Dr McTurk will give you the answers
https://insideevs.com/news/437966/uk-end-gas-diesel-car-sales/