UK: free home charging installation

. Sounds like a really good deal. Isn't the normal wiring in the UK already 240 Volts/30 Amperes?

 

I'm not an electrician so I'll probably be corrected but a household plug gives 13 amps but is really limited to about 10 amps. You can easily get a 32 amp separate socket connected for the purposes of an electric oven or EV charger. Many houses will come with an 80 amp mains supply.

So many houses can offer 32 amp EV charging and some can provide more - I think.

 

Yeah I'm in North Yorks.

Was a member on the leaftalk uk forum and this was discussed at length, including by those in the industry. The government subsidised home chargers must be able to communicate with 'base'. That's why it's a British Gas or ChargeMaster version and why they're so keen to install them. It's also why they cost £800 instead of £150.

Granted, one could just use a 13 amp home socket - for now. But the EU is wanting to make it illegal to charge from your home sockets and only from a standard and specialised charger. The new Renault Zoe does NOT come with a home plug option - full stop. The benefit they give is that such a charger will give quicker charging times and be safer - both of which are true. The down side is that you can only use a specialised charger and thus be stuffed if yours breaks down or you get caught short of charge away from home. The specialised chargers must communicate with 'base' and thus tell base how much electricity you have used and when. At the moment this matters not, but give it 5 years and there'll be a different electricity tariff for EV charging, or peak EV charging.

Give me a good reason why the Government are wanting smart meters put in all homes in the next 5 years and why they're also insisting 'official' home chargers (and the government subsidised street chargers) have sim cards in them to connect to Chargemasters (or whoevers) base? There are many reports of the official EV chargers not working in multistory car parks as they can't pick up the 3g signal.

It's not a conspiracy, it's a way of them ensuring tax revenue (in the future granted) from EVs. If any UK government didnt ensure something of this nature, then as EVs become more popular, they'd lose out on the £billions raised by taxing petrol and diesel.

Count me as an American fruit who pretends to be from Yorkshire (why I'd do that I don't know ), but at least search into this a little more and you'll see. EVs have amazing low costs to run, but that's mainly because there is zero tax on their 'fuel'. That has to change - unfortunately.

 

I went with PodPoint. No problems.

The reason for the SIM card is two fold:
1. So the government may monitor usage, time of day, power consumed, etc. which is a great unknown at the moment.
2. So the electricity companies may control charging times. In my contract with PodPoint it allows them, in advance of the pending legislation, to turn off charging when they wish to control power usage in peak times, probably only for a few minutes rolling around the region to even out the overall load. This is also a function of 'smart meters'. The power companies want to reduce peak consumption below what they can produce with out installing more power stations. When enough 'smart' consumers are available they will introduce different tariffs for different times of the day similar to the old Economy 7 concept but much more fragmented and no separate meter involved, it will be up to you to turn appliances on and off at the best times to save money.

I know engineering companies who use an agency which monitors electricity usage every 30 minutes and change to the best supplier's tariff. They might swap around eight or ten suppliers on a typical day for the best rates. Cutthroat.

The battle between the power companies and the government is over who pays for new power stations. The companies want the government (us) to pay the capital cost of billions and they will run them and cream off the profits. The government (all parties) are refusing and demanding the power companies pay. This is why so many stations are closing and the national news reports that we are headed for brown outs and cuts during peak demand. The power companies are pushing the grid to the limit in an effort to see 'who blinks first' and will cough up.

When it all goes dark this winter (it is looking like a cold one again) each side will blame the other and the piggies in the middle, the public, will loose out again.

At the end of the day the consumer will always pay but the government want the kudos of saying they are saving the country money and the power companies want the profits.

P.S. My contract with PodPoint expires in three years, the unit is then mine and I may, of course, remove the SIM, if it hasn't accidentally worked its way loose before then.

 

In the U.S., one of the proposals to deal with the loss of fuel tax revenue from EVs is to assess a mileage-based fee on the annual registration fee that one has to pay on their car. Currently, these annual fees are based on factors like the current value of the car, or its weight. Is an annual fee something that is done in the U.K. or other European countries?

I can imagine that the government could require that EV car chargers use a sophisticated encryption process and only activate when talking with a device that could authorize itself. And of course, that device would handle the required government fees. At least until some enterprising "entrepreneur" cracked the encryption

 

We have an annual 'car tax' to pay depending on emissions. This ranges from £0 per year to £500 depending on the type of car.

Vehicle tax rate tables - GOV.UK

It's based on the amount of CO2 emitted over one km. The Prius comes in at 89g/km and thus below the 100g/km minimum range and pays £0. A Range Rover V8 petrol is in the highest banding and pays £490 per year. All this is in addition to the high rates of petrol tax we pay;

Fuel tax: British motorists pay up to 60% duty and VAT on petrol | Mail Online


They tried to introduce a distance based tax using tracking devices but that was not popular at all - think 1984!

BBC NEWS | UK | 'Pay-as-you-go' road charge plan

 

While some have suggested a tracking device, the more palatable idea is to just use the odometer. This particularly works in states that have regular smog inspections where some presumably neutral party would just read the odometer and report it to the state along with the results of the smog test. Only problem is, is that hybrids are often exempt from the inspections, and inspections are obviously a non-issue for pure EV vehicles!

 

Mileage is recorded on the annual safety inspection (MOT test), but it is easy to 'adjust' the odometer despite being illegal.

MOT test - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

And then there is the problem of the mileage done while travelling abroad: the governmemt should not be able to levy taxes on my usage of foreign infrastructures!

 

And what happens if I were to charge my electric car from my own solar pv?