lol-lol

Hi George, apparently the removal of UK mainland VAT on electricity, aka the E rate ie lower than Standard and a reduced rate, does not apply in Northern Ireland !! The South of Ireland has a rate of 9% on domestic electricity and also the highest prices in the EU sadly. They are looking to rapidly build battery storage and thewy cannot wait to get the interlink to France which is due online in a couple years. Like most gas systems they do use a bit of electricity to pump the water around and run the control board. 4.8% drop for home charging EVs and home devices is welcome but it just makes the difference more noticeable to public chargers though I see some big networks are doing all summer discounts of about 20% ie MFG for 1.

The UK Grid needs to evolve as all Grids need to throughout the world due to massive home generation and also massive home battery storage. If there is any Black Outs or Brown Outs one will soon see which homes and businesses have invested in resilience by their lights still on. UK home generation is now estimated at over 3 GWs though this is of course dependent on good solar input. Storage, business and home, is over 10 GWh by many estimates and that figure is expected to increase several fold over the next 4 or 5 years. Projects like the Great Glen, 30 GWh, will add to Dinorwig's 9 GWh plus other slammer plants to increase resilience. Of course their are "Preference Trips" in place which trip out some business and loads such as street lights to maintain supply to homes and hospitals which could be running breathing assistance equipment though hospitals should have emergency gennies which I expect are being replaced with battery systems as a matter of course. Electricity is the only way forward though backup to Grid supplies are needed of course, even if that is ICE as no one if their right mind should object to ICE, or gas turbines as with power stations, being an emergency backup for a few hours.

Mirrors, reflection, low sun shining beneath trucks flat bed area. Amazed TESLA have not joined the rest of the automotive world with LIDAR. Not perfect, I have had brakes come on with a large leaf or plastic bag blowing across the road and quite a few reports of mysterious braking for no apparent reason. Not just an EV thing. I hit a some slow bird in one of my Octavia VRSs and it knocked that LIDAR detector plate on the front of the car and despite being "fixed" it was never the same.

More about TESLAs tech of Self Driving than TESLAs as EVs. TESLA use optical system i read rather than LIDAR which most car safety and self driving use. TESLA use TESLA vision which has had considerable criticism for being "fooled" in certain circumstances. Adaptive cruise control is enough tech for me abd self driving a step too far at the moment but will probably use FSD in tHe future but not TESLA but with a European, Korean or Japanese manufacturer.

it is more so homes, including balcony solar roll out, that the Grid will play less of a role in supplying domestic electricity. Clearly the Grid will do more to supply EV charging stations with ever more charging, depending on whether EV charging stations and data hubs put more of their own batteries and possibly even diesel generator backup for outages or when pricing goes silly a £1 a KWh or more. Octopus and Martin Lewis are our UK champions and what I follow. There are so many Youtube in-experts out there I don't waste my time. my retirement will continue to involve expanding my own electrical generation and storage using the new tech coming in and using the Time of Use tariffs to keep my energy bills low ie sub £2k per year despite having 3 EVs and a detached house which I am home most the time and therefore uses quite a lot of power ie over 20 MWh per year ie energy sub 10p per KWh cost !

My concern was community nursing etc being asked to use their cars and being out of pocket. Their role in the community is so important I am not too bothered what engine type they use but the EV salary schemes many employers are offering do make it tax efficient for some of them to choose EVs. Since I am retired and no longer claim mileage its all down to myself paying any bills but with all the new solar and wind farms coming online one hopes electricity prices will fall as long as data centre demands for power does not drives the cost up of course. Negative pricing of electricity is great and I plan to keep expanding my solar and battery at home to further lower the energy running costs and this should offset the 3p per mile charge which already looks like there are a few methods to effectively reduce the cost to below 3p per mile.

Looks like best to under estimate one's mileage and then pay any difference either on selling the car or being forced to give full mileage at service / MOT time. Certainly will look to behave differently when it comes in. Drive more short cut journeys through towns, A and B roads rather than motorways. Pump tyres up, monitor more oft. Would not be happy to have a TESLA where one report said they were over reading mileage by as much as 10% ! Still 20 months before it comes in and it will be interesting to see how it affects buyers / drivers decisions.

£2k Milltek body kit for Alpine A290 or Renault 5. Hopefully comes in yellow.

The 3 EVs i have had, all the Renault Zoe, Scenic and 5, give full performance across the entire state of charge range 100% to below 0%, some polite reminders from about 15% as to about how about using ECO mode. Mini is different, it has more power than any of the Renaults and it does start reducing available power down from the 181 hp from about 20%, not massively at first, but it does try and restrict power sage to extend range by a bit. Dont think it goes many miles past 0% unlike the Renaults and TESLA according to Bjorn Nyland. Yes its about 300 feet up the hill which the EVs won out on or the Rally cars come down and sadly get much less attention than the road and road racing cars. Some years ago I was a guest of Skoda for the Goodwood FoS rally, won a place with them from the Autosport show. Got to meet Andreas Mikkelsen who still does WRC for Skoda. one of the 4 of us got to copilot with him down the hill but it I missed out but a great experience for all 4 of us and especially the one who got to go with Andreas. All the rally cars are ICE and I think the WRC has dropped the hybrid ie battery component until road and road race cars, F1 etc, which now heavily lean on hybrid. Looking forward to the full electric Gen 4 race cars going on more of the F1 circuits and compare times. Formula e will still use road tyres I gather but 4 wheel drive should and the big increase in power and torque should give some interesting times, Circuit of America etc.

Hills ? I thought EVs are suppose to be so heavy that would affect their hill climbing. EVs are just so much quicker off the mark as their torque is at a nidge over tickover spinning revs whereas with an ICE car it is going to be mid or upper rev range. The ICE car loses even before the first 20m usually. Noise is wasted power. Fine for a 4 year old child going brmm, brmm but must start to feel embarrassing when you have a crescendo of noise but keep coming second ie "first last". I am reminded off poor off the mark of ICE cars many a day. Off to the pub Saturday night, Corsa draws up on my outside with us in the 5. My five is the Evolution model ie only 120 hp but what it has got is instant torque like all EVs. Race to the left turn almost over within the first second. Corsa might have been a 1.2 turbo ICE but no match for just about any EV off the line. Loud exhaust does not help but only gives the ICE driver more theatre not noticeably better acceleration, tailpipe between legs, again.

Goodwood festival of Speed over for another year. Fastest times up the hill this year. McMurray did not run again this year. Lots of ICE cars making lots of noise but not going that quickly. Quickest cars may surprise. (Spoiler, not ICE cars but what you possibly did not want to see, or hear)

No but if needs must one can go from doing 4 or 5 miles per KWh to up to 10 miles per KWh, Bjorn Nyland has proved this time and time again. Not suggest one becomes a total menace driving at 20 mph, which is more than the average speed in London most of the time, but dropping to 30 mph, going on to city streets, it is the limited speed of new mopeds sold from late 70s to about a decade ago, and some of our EVs can then get approaching 10 miles per KWh. In my 5 years and near 100k miles driving an EV, compared to my circa 1M driving ICE cars, only once had to think oh now not got the range to get me home and get the cheap electricity and that was when the M5 junction 1, the Baggies junction, was at a standstill. Satnav said go round Brum ring road clockwise, some 30 miles further, get a charge somewhere, zap and dash, and get home about an hour later. But one doesn't do that, I diverted down the Black COuntry Express Way and cut thru the Black Country. Got home about quarter of an hour later with miles to spare, not sure if I used my 20 mile of so buffer below 0% or not. According to AA only about 1.5% of EV call out are for out of traction power. Sadly we suffer irreparable tyre failures and the like, same as ICE cars, much more oft the running out of lecky.

LEAF Mk 2 is / was a C segment car, unlike the Zoe which was B segment. The two versions 39 and 60 kwh versions. I tried to order / buy the 60 kwh but it was in short supply, long order delay. 60 kwh version has / had a 240 mile WLTP range and a buffer of around 10 miles below 0% Went for the 52 kwh Zoe and did not regret it despite it only being B segment size. Zoe has done well over 400 miles in hyper miling exercise.

US has 120v throughout the house usually and 240v in the basement and garage for heavier duty appliances. Maybe Musk, as was Mr Tesla, DC Is more efficient than AC and as more and more generation is becoming DC then passing into AC and then back to DC is a huge waste of power.

More countries and US states joining in on plug in solar revolution. California to join Texas abd several other states, and Germany of course, to provide free supply of electricity to consumers. As mentioned on can easily bypass the plug in route by getting a shoe box sized battery, Lithium Iron Phophate preferable, to taje the solar input and then use it to supply the power hungry fridge freezer. One can do this as well as join the Time Of Use tariffs which can mean access to negative and very cheap electricity, like we are getting tomorrow for 5.5 hours, and we gave half such sessions each week for the last weeks to charge the EVs, doing the washing, heat the water for baths etc. With Greg Jackson being part of government, for 3 years, and his no 1 UK company partnership with CATL, falling battery prices it is looking good for cheaper electricity to those willing to adopt these systems.

Plug in solar not directly linked to Electric vehicles thought it is possible to link solar, via battery, to charging electric cars as I and many others do this. Perhaps we need a specific thread for plug in /balcony solar ? Feeding back in to the house ring main is an interesting practice and millions do it all over Europe and other continents. Meanwhile, the VW Group, Skoda etc, has a big meeting today to decide jobs and production cuts which some would say is due to the weakness of its EV offerings over the last 5 years or so, compared to the Chinese, Koreans, Renault, TESLA etc.... Sad time for those of us who loved VAG cars. Particularly as the new ID2 /Polo platformed cars look much better than previous offerings......

Bjorn Nyland and Batterylife Youtubers do lots of this testing and publishing all the way up to genuine 130 kph. Most EVs not good at speed limit motorway speeds as they are tallish due to the battery pack beneath the floor. Those who need to do such long journeys at speed tend to go for TESLAs, Polestars, some Mercs and increasingly BYD models. Happy with our 5, Mini and Scenic. In the Scenic most of my braking is with paddles which can set level of regen. On motorway I put it in level 0 which is freewheel when no power being applied.

I don't believe solar panel catch fire, they are very inert items, can get quite warm though. I would summize that any fire has come from the wiring from the panels to the solar inverters or batteries. Thus us the only issue i have seen with my two solar arrays mounted on my metal structures which hold the panels abmnd then I choose to out the panels in parallel or series to feed the solar controllers. I strong suspect any detailed investigation will point at wiring and the installation. My wires got hot as they were carrying lots of current and in this exceptionally high temperatures. Fixed now as a few wires were running too hot. This has been solved in many parts of the workd, Europe for example, my doing more installs over car parks, perhaps playground shade seating rather tgan roofs which always seemed to me not the best place to put panels. Put them in other places where tge angle to tge sun can be optimised rather tgan roofs which are very compromised and to angle and also clearly not ventilated or the wiring done properly can result in biulding damage.

My third EV charger ie the Granny cable, has a 16A setting ad do many of these devices sold in the UK. Dont think they disable it for the UK sales. I could change a twin socket to a Commando 16A socket. Be nice to maximise EV charging when the price goes negative. It could mean 15 KWs plus house load which would push the 80A main fuse those nice people from the Grid reduced me to.

I would love to have 3 phase like so many European countries do as well as 16A as the normal socket output. Solar panels as well as batteries are tested and have tens of millions of examples running in much higher temperatures than the UK so I am not worried in that regard. Their efficiency can drop a bit in high temperatures and in some super hot places they do a bit of water cooling which restores their peak efficiency. As with tve batteries just amazed how robust they are. Plugged in, not plugged in, hitting maximum capacity of the batteries and the battery stops the panels adding power no problem. Cooling of the batteries seems very conservative with the fans kicking in to cool the cells regularly when temps on high side. Since China is the world supplier of so many electrical devices from small devices to cars, trucks etc and in to so many markets ie cold to very hot, I am pleasantly surprised at their quality. Not surprised they have come to dominate most consumer markets.

A couple of million Germans and several million other Europeans are running this fine. We do UK electrical networks are inferior in some ways ie only 13A sockets instead of 16A which is the UK norm for heavier duty outlets in Europe. I do not see the commissioning of the reports as trying to push on plug in solar in the UK but more to make sure the UK government does not get burnt by consequences that pop up later. Still more to do as the report states and many of us are generating our our electricity already, not from roof top solar and powerwall type batteries but by exactly this sort of tech but we are not feeding back through wall sockets but via shoebox batteries that link between the solar and the power hungry devices like our fridge freezers and TVs. looks like it is making progress and and at quite a pace and we should be looking to not fall so far behind what many other countries are doing and put up with high energy bills because most of our energy companies, not Octopus, are profit maximising entities.

Good news for UK Balcony / Plug in solar to start catching up to Germany etc with its multi-million install of this tech. Report attached.... I wonder how much it can be used and crucially enough to provide some charge to EVs as well as power all the home electricity needs instantly during the day and via charged battery for nighttime using the freely harvested solar and charging shoe box sized batteries to store and use electricity when cheap so bills much smaller. Pay back 2 to 3 years. Plug-in-solar-PV-study.pdf

Octopus teaming up with world's largest battery maker CATL... This Youtuber seems to say renters can have these batteries, we will see, I think there is a battle to be had here. Greg of Octopus is doing 3 year stint with UK government so has some influence.... Smaller range, Nook, might bee able to transfer some charge to an EV, Colossus is more for that I suppose but also reverse charging possible with these setups and the right EV.

Apparently 90% of power lines use aluminium rather than copper. Steel core to give it strength.

was a long time ago but think it was being trialled for power lines when copper went silly expensive and being lighter one could have pylons further apart ie less of them. Also use in cars making recycling easier. All such things worth reviewing periodically for cost and technical reasons. The world's richest man wants cars to do 48v rather than a nominal 12v also to "phase out" AC for DC everywhere. I think he might think he is Nicola Tesla reborn !