EV charging prices in Europe increase 500%

I've got a 7 yr. old 15 panel pv system in zip 93436 that pretty much handles my modest home and a Volt driven -20 mi./day. I'm on a good grid tie contract. With the generous rebates and credits, it's paid for its self and the Volt gives me a 2kw 120v back up power source that could keep us going for a week with just the gas in the tank. 8)

Very happy!

I've seen mobile / trailer homes with over 8kW of panels on them.

With a little $400 genset as a supplement when the weather is cloudy would be fine to keep a daily-use Tesla going so long's civilization is within 50mi.

Living off grid, obviously the farther away you are from your work and shopping, the more expensive your annual transportation cost will be.

john61ct said:

Living off grid, obviously the farther away you are from your work and shopping, the more expensive your annual transportation cost will be.

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But HH wants to live 300 miles from the nearest store/city, and therefore EV's are useless!

JackFlorey said:

But HH wants to live 300 miles from the nearest store/city, and therefore EV's are useless!

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You must have an overactive BS gland , Jack..
I know you cannot find any quote where i have said that .

Hillhater said:

I know you cannot find any quote where i have said that.

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Nor did I claim that. I was merely extrapolating your next attempt to claim that EV's are useless, only for rich people, too impractical, not available in the right colors - or a combination of all of those things.

I eagerly await it.

In fact, the increased weight of the Tesla Model 3, as well as noticeably deteriorated aerodynamics, completely neutralized the potential benefit. In addition, do not forget that the power of solar panels is about 800 W, which means that even under ideal conditions, it will take about 80 hours to charge a car from 0 to 100%. If the sun shines on average for 10 hours a day, then the charging process will take as long as a week. Research from the United States shows that roughly every three electric vehicle owners have their own private on-grid solar station with monocrystalline solar panels vs polycrystalline solar panels, no matter
.

Yes direct from solar output into an EV is silly.

However

Pioce said:

the power of solar panels is about 800 W

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is nonsensical as well.

Completely depends on how large your array

Yes, a Leaf or Bolt would be a great car for the daily commute. But the problem with that idea is that most people can't afford to have a specific commuter EV. So that's why they have SUVs, fancy or otherwise. Most of us need to have our one daily driver vehicle do it all... commute, haul, travel with people, etc. So that means a lot of time some of the capacity is unused... but what is the alternative? Buy another $$ vehicle? I don't think so.

JackFlorey said:

Because SUV's are extremely popular - and generally unneeded. If you want to get cheap transportation to work, then the Leaf is a great option. If you are made of money, then you might have fun flaunting your wealth and buying a fancy SUV.

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I remember another similar story from some years back from the UK, I believe, where they "revised" the arrangements with utilities for people with PV solar installations so they could not get fair (or any?, it was awhile ago and I don't remember in detail) compensation for the power they fed to the grid. A lot of folks were made instantly underwater financially on their expensive solar systems. I am not sure if that situation has improved or changed. There are powerful interests everywhere not really opposing green energy and vehicles so much as trying to hang onto their gravy trains of profits.

raylo32 said:

Yes, a Leaf or Bolt would be a great car for the daily commute. But the problem with that idea is that most people can't afford to have a specific commuter EV. So that's why they have SUVs, fancy or otherwise. Most of us need to have our one daily driver vehicle do it all... commute, haul, travel with people, etc. So that means a lot of time some of the capacity is unused... but what is the alternative? Buy another $$ vehicle? I don't think so.

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When I lived in NY a great many people commuted to the city. Their families would have two cars - a beater (called "the station car") and a family hauler. The station car would drive the 8 miles to the train station and be parked there all day.

And nowadays, a $5000 used EV makes a great station car.

That being said, for single people who only have one car, and who absolutely must have an SUV, there are now PHEV SUV's that combine EV range for commuting with a regular ICE engine for long distances.

Yup, the beater commuter car is the way to go. One of my co-workers had an ancient Toyota Corolla that looked like it had been to the moon and back for his daily 100 mile commute here in the DC area. It almost lasted until his retirement but it expired with less than a year to go. Good luck getting your wife to drive something like that! I am still amazed by folks here who burn through $40,000-$50,000 vehicles every 2 or 3 years just driving to work. I took the other approach of getting a place near where I worked so no need for a beater. And I can't believe you can get a decent used EV for $5000. At least one with a reliable battery.

JackFlorey said:

And nowadays, a $5000 used EV makes a great station car.

That being said, for single people who only have one car, and who absolutely must have an SUV, there are now PHEV SUV's that combine EV range for commuting with a regular ICE engine for long distances.

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Bought a 2013 Nissan leaf three years ago and have been happy with it. I don't work and share the car with my mother who drives it more than me.

Average trips around here are 3-5 miles and once a month or less we drive 20-30 miles. Did not know much about the batteries in EV's. To me it was a bit lower than it should have been so now I would have questioned buying it.

It is only charged about 6 times in a month. The SOC stays between 80% - 40%. Once every 3-6 months I will charge it up to 100%.
It has been losing 3 mile a year. I don't pay much attention to it any more so i'm forgetting. Here is a guess 3 yrs ago it would go 71 miles now its' in the mid 60's. I would need to do a test. My mother does not get the mile per kilowatt that I get so I reports low for her. Last time I drove it put 30 miles on and the reported miles left only fell 5 miles.

I figure in 2-3 years it will be ten years old but still able to do what I need. So don't know to replace the battery or buy another used EV 3-4 years old. It maybe my last car or upgrade depending on what I do.

raylo32 said:

I remember another similar story from some years back from the UK, I believe, where they "revised" the arrangements with utilities for people with PV solar installations so they could not get fair (or any?, it was awhile ago and I don't remember in detail) compensation for the power they fed to the grid. A lot of folks were made instantly underwater financially on their expensive solar systems. I am not sure if that situation has improved or changed. There are powerful interests everywhere not really opposing green energy and vehicles so much as trying to hang onto their gravy trains of profits.

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That situation ( reduced FIT..feed in tariff) is happening as more and more RT solar is installed.
Here, when RT solar was introduced , a FIT of 64c/kWh was offered !.. so it was a no brainer to get the solar installed to charge the bank account !.. the best marketing stunt for Solar ever..effectively paying people to install it !
However , over time the market has changed to the point where most FIT offers are 6-10c /kWh, and even those have compromises on the supply cost such that FIT is barely worth it unless you have a ton of surplus solar from an already paid down Solar set.
There is also serious talk of introducing -ve FIT..IE actually CHARGING solar owners to feed into the grid since there is a surplus of power now that there is a large % of private homes with RT Solar installed (25% ?)....and that causes many unforseen issues with the grid.

Yeah, renewable input totally screws up power grids. Hopefully any recent work is being done with renewable distribution in mind but older infrastructure was only designed to work in a single direction, from the power plant to the consumer. There's a lot of potential for a whole new method of distribution, traditional filling station locations becoming obsolete and things like warehouses getting additional income from a damn great battery bank and using their roof space for solar for example. Could work out really well for places like schools and supermarkets, extra income for them and no need for an extra trip to a filling station for the consumer.

I dont think you see the full picture stan,
With a lot of RT solar, there is a huge reduction in consumer demand at midday, just at the same time as the grid Utility Solar also peaks, which if everything else,... (wind Nuclear, Gas, hydro etc..) ..are all operating “normally” ,..then there is a huge sutplus of generation to be redirected or curtailed .
Hydro can be shut down ,.but it is a very small % of generation anyway, and gas can be reduced as can wind..., Nuclear not so easy !
But anytime you shut down, or curtail, a generation facility of any sort, it becomes inefficient and makes it more expensive to operate...leading to increased electricity prices.
Diverting power to batteries is a nice theoretical solution, but they also cost money, and the reality is that enough storage to cater for a significant scale of grid curtailment,..is simply impractical

And remember the "grid" isn't one entity and that the generators are a broad mix of private providers all in it to make profits. In a perfect world one might have all the nukes running stable 100% output 24/7/365 and then switch the gas turbine plants on and off as required. But there is no mechanism to do that, nor is it possible (at least here in the US) to tell private owners of these plants what to do and when to run or not run. Don't see this changing unless some entirely totally new *massive* storage technology is developed to harvest and store off peak KWh.

Hillhater said:

I dont think you see the full picture stan,
With a lot of RT solar, there is a huge reduction in consumer demand at midday, just at the same time as the grid Utility Solar also peaks, which if everything else,... (wind Nuclear, Gas, hydro etc..) ..are all operating “normally” ,..then there is a huge sutplus of generation to be redirected or curtailed .
Hydro can be shut down ,.but it is a very small % of generation anyway, and gas can be reduced as can wind..., Nuclear not so easy !
But anytime you shut down, or curtail, a generation facility of any sort, it becomes inefficient and makes it more expensive to operate...leading to increased electricity prices.
Diverting power to batteries is a nice theoretical solution, but they also cost money, and the reality is that enough storage to cater for a significant scale of grid curtailment,..is simply impractical

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I doubt anyone sees the whole picture but I'm fairly sure several countries have had their eyes opened to it the hard way with their grids coming close to total meltdown from wind power. Trying to balance loads with direct control of the generating equipment is hard enough but when there are external sources supplying more than demand... Ireland did a total about-face on grid tie setups a few years back, it was fairly simple for years (some weird standard on inverters that pushed the cost up by about 5x but otherwise simple) and practically overnight they prohibited all grid ties, fairly sure they came very close to that runaway situation, too much power coming in and no place for it to go.

Smart grids and dynamic pricing is what's needed, making it worth while to store power when it's dirt cheap and sell it back when there's high demand, create the incentive for a storage industry to develop. Lots of projects are working towards that kind of thing but national uptake seems extremely slow. In Ireland the reason for that is fairly simple, no big players are in a position to exploit it so the door is closed until they're ready, the door will never be opened for the little guy to get there first.

Internet distribution is a prime example of that, a smart grid needs connectivity so it makes sense to combine both internet and power distribution but that's not allowed here because it might upset the ISPs, a parallel communications infrastructure has to be built from the ground up instead. Hamstrung before it even gets started.

It's a crazy situation and that kind of BS is why we don't have a competitive charging infrastructure that's as seamless as buying fossil fuels even after more than a decade of charging stations first appearing, instead we have a godawful mess of dozens of different providers with their own payment systems and sky-high prices :/

Your point #1. Yes, but the devil is in the details. Dynamic or tiered pricing and other such schemes can open the door to manipulation. See also Enron. Or the state of Texas where people were paying thousands of $$ for $100 worth of electricity after storms crushed their grid last year.

Your point #2. Agree totally. And it's the same way media content is going. Instead of some universal pay on demand by data use or some other measure we have almost all content providers floating their own platforms with their own subscription and fee structures. What a mess.

stan.distortion said:

Smart grids and dynamic pricing is what's needed, making it worth while to store power when it's dirt cheap and sell it back when there's high demand, create the incentive for a storage industry to develop. Lots of projects are working towards that kind of thing but national uptake seems extremely slow. In Ireland the reason for that is fairly simple, no big players are in a position to exploit it so the door is closed until they're ready, the door will never be opened for the little guy to get there first.


It's a crazy situation and that kind of BS is why we don't have a competitive charging infrastructure that's as seamless as buying fossil fuels even after more than a decade of charging stations first appearing, instead we have a godawful mess of dozens of different providers with their own payment systems and sky-high prices :/

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Yeah, that smart grid experiment in the US was a total farce and must have been a nightmare for anyone caught up in it. Too many bean counters calling the shots imo, all the focus on the market with barely a thought to the technical aspects and those technical aspects are an absolute doozy! Several cryptocurrency projects have been targeting smart grids too and that's the same kind of BS all over again, no different to shutting off the throttle on your ebike and having to wait 10 minutes for the signal to arrive at the controller. Smart grids need immediate response, microseconds, they can't wait for some Wall st. trademonkeys to come back from their long weekend and click "sell".

As far as Texas. We were told the Power Grid is fix! Yet we are having Black Outs every week now. Not the whole town, more like a rolling black out. Last year there was one here in San Antonio. Not counting the Winter Black out that lasted three days.

Last time I talked to CPS our power provider, about a Solar hook up. I was told that they would not buy power but could use the grid for storage at no cost. Our transformers are old and do not push power back to the supply lines. At my location 4 houses are on one transformer, any excess power made by me would need to be used by one of those houses.

ZeroEm said:

As far as Texas. We were told the Power Grid is fix! Yet we are having Black Outs every week now. Not the whole town, more like a rolling black out. Last year there was one here in San Antonio. Not counting the Winter Black out that lasted three days.

Last time I talked to CPS our power provider, about a Solar hook up. I was told that they would not buy power but could use the grid for storage at no cost. Our transformers are old and do not push power back to the supply lines. At my location 4 houses are on one transformer, any excess power made by me would need to be used by one of those houses.

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All the same, still viable even for just those 4 houses. Spinningmagnets did a few really good articles on his blogs about it, some good info in there including a lot on US regulations on selling electricity:
https://chestnutparadise.com/2019/09/28/cut-your-solar-payback-time-in-half-by-billing-your-tenants-for-electricity-you-generate-for-free/

I'd envisioned doing something similar around here (hilly area with lots of potential for small scale hydro). It would be very easy to do using cryptocurrency and more than enough hydro going spare to power the whole area but that's when I'd found out about the connectivity situation, absolutely bloody stupid needing separate communications for management and payments so decided to shelve it for a more enlightened time or place.

I will read up!
Thinking about some solar and Generator Propane/NatGas. Don't want to run AC or heaters. Keep the food cold, Fan, radio or TV and charge the phones and maybe the car and bikes.

ZeroEm said:

Last time I talked to CPS our power provider, about a Solar hook up. I was told that they would not buy power but could use the grid for storage at no cost. Our transformers are old and do not push power back to the supply lines. At my location 4 houses are on one transformer, any excess power made by me would need to be used by one of those houses.

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If there is a large enough storage capacity available at no cost on the grid...that is a mega deal !
You could have a decent size solar array (10kW ?) and build up a decent store of back up fo night use and blackouts.
But it would need to be a 100-200kWh store for safe carry through bad weather/ blackouts.
Texas wont be free of blackouts whilst it relies on Wind as a main generator.

I don't understand. If power can't be pushed back to the grid how can you use the grid for storage? Are you saying they would somehow record the power you feed to the other 3 houses and credit you with that amount?

ZeroEm said:

Last time I talked to CPS our power provider, about a Solar hook up. I was told that they would not buy power but could use the grid for storage at no cost. Our transformers are old and do not push power back to the supply lines. At my location 4 houses are on one transformer, any excess power made by me would need to be used by one of those houses.

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CPS updated our Meters 5-8 yrs ago. They are wireless, digital now. They record the flow both ways. Old Transformers did not push power to the Grid. Now there are transformers that can buck the flow. Just don't know if the new one (2yrs old) on the pole has that feature. I'm sure if one or more of the houses has a lot of solar then they would upgrade the transformer if needed.

Ray no more than we would make the other houses would suck that little bit up. The size of the array would not be enough during the summer. CPS wants us to make just a little more than we use. It's all averaged out. They count our excess that the other houses are using as storage

by raylo32 » Nov 08 2021 8:18am

I don't understand. If power can't be pushed back to the grid how can you use the grid for storage? Are you saying they would somehow record the power you feed to the other 3 houses and credit you with that amount?

ZeroEm wrote: ↑Aug 26 2021 7:55am
Last time I talked to CPS our power provider, about a Solar hook up. I was told that they would not buy power but could use the grid for storage at no cost. Our transformers are old and do not push power back to the supply lines. At my location 4 houses are on one transformer, any excess power made by me would need to be used by one of those houses.

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Would not say that 15% -24% of total output would be the main generator of power. You could say it is one of the main producers.

"According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), wind power accounted for at least 15.7% of the electricity generated in Texas during 2017, as wind was 17.4% of electricity generated in ERCOT, which manages 90% of Texas's power."

Renewable energy is not to blame for the Texas energy crisis
"About 56 percent of Texas' energy comes from natural gas, just under 24 percent comes from wind, 19 percent from coal, and almost 9 percent from nuclear energy"

I like reading you Hillhater and you have clued me into more about my state than knew before. Bashing what you don't like is not facts. It is true that they did not winterize the wind turbines and some or a lot froze up. The major cause for the outage was the Nat gas lines froze. Some may not know Natural gas is very wet and produces a lot humidity when used and it also freezes when cold.

Would like a large battery bank. Think it is best if I only use as little power as I can. just the basics with a smallish bank. Think after that a Nat Gas generator would fill the gap. 99% of our outages are less than a day. We can never go off grid in town. The city passed a law of your not connected to CPS you can not live in the house.

by Hillhater » Nov 08 2021 1:53am
If there is a large enough storage capacity available at no cost on the grid...that is a mega deal !
You could have a decent size solar array (10kW ?) and build up a decent store of back up fo night use and blackouts.
But it would need to be a 100-200kWh store for safe carry through bad weather/ blackouts.
Texas wont be free of blackouts whilst it relies on Wind as a main generator.

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