Scottish Power is to build public charging points for electric vehicles throughout Britain, which should help to allay so-called range anxiety, from which drivers suffer on long journeys. The company expects to start installing points in out-of-town retail parks, leisure centres, golf clubs, hotels and motorway junctions at the end of the year and is investing £2 billion in the scheme which could create 300 jobs. Keith Anderson, chief executive of Scottish Power, which is ultimately owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish company, said: “We believe there will be good high demand for people wanting to stop for 10 or 15 minutes, maybe even half an hour, in places to get a coffee and plug their car in.”
Times 27th Feb 2019 read more »
Letter: COPING with the peaks and troughs of electricity demand involves large amounts of overcapacity that sit idle for much of the day, or substantial amounts of storage. Hence the 1970s fashion for economy meters, storage heaters, and the campaigns to run our washing machines overnight, to level demand and avoid having expensive nuclear power stations operating at less than full capacity. Fortunately, in Bill Brown’s scenario of people arriving home from work, plugging their car into charge, and putting on the electric central heating, television, kettle and cooker, he already has his own answer. Few people want an electric car that only has enough battery to get them to work and back, an average of only 8.8 miles each way if we assume Scotland is close to English statistics. We will demand cars that cope with the longer trips we only take weekly or monthly. So the typical car will arrive home with a substantial amount of remaining charge and will be plugged in to top up for the next morning. Rather than start charging immediately, it could wait, or it is entirely possible to use the car battery to supply the evening peak demand, and then recharge itself back to full overnight, then discharge a little to supply the morning peak demand too. Take a simple car app. Add some input from the user about their planned driving: work and back during the week, the golf course on Monday and Thursday, a quiet Saturday and then a full charge on Sunday to visit the family on the other side of the country. Then add some information from the power company which will use the weather forecasts to predict cheap times to charge and expensive times to feed back to the grid, and the car will be earning money.
Herald 26th Feb 2019 read more »
