West London faces new home ban as electric grid at capacity due to data centres
ft.com
ft.com
It's not exactly "joined-up" thinking.
As a climate change alarmist, I consider any "ban on X in < 20 years" promise as wishful thinking or a populist lie, which will eventually turn into a huge cash-grab and tax reliefs for their lobbyist friends that will have gotten into electric by then.
I admire all those that still believe their favourite party will fight climate change.
That, and with smart charging (ie off-peak) we could smooth the consumption curve, meaning we could use non-elastic generation (nuclear, ..?) more?
Sunny places like Australia are having the problem of too much solar on the grid now and looking at community batteries and EV charging as ways to offset that and stabilise things.
Also, as far as heating goes, passive houses should need almost nothing for the winter (still need to heat water for showering, etc. though).
E: Can you share your numbers? A 10kWp plant that I had in mind is ~50m^2 - 30x330kWp panels at about 1.6m^2 each, so did you mean you actually need a 60kWp plant?
"Passive houses" are not going to happen in the UK for the vast majority of the population in my lifetime!
It might happen, but the technology still isn't there, yet we're going all in on renewables, especially in countries like Germany and Italy where nuclear is politically toxic.
And those guys are going to support anyone who is going to oppose ICE ban, because for people living on country side it will be absolutely unaffordable to have BEV with range of their current old ICE car.
That doesn't even begin to affect their purchases for 20-40 years and even then, it still doesn't ban plug-in hybrids, that will be their best options for 10 year old cars in about 10 years time anyway?
It just makes no sense.
Yes, it is. Are they intentionally not buying the second hand PHEVs Which will probably still be available to buy new at this point? Are they picking their cars at random? Or do they run some kind of rough calculation of expected running costs for their intended usage before they decide to buy it?
If so then the ones that only need 50km daily range can buy the BEV and save on gas, and the other ones can buy the PHEVs and still save on gas, which will probably be pretty expensive since we're talking about the year 2040 at the minimum if they really need to get a car exactly 10 years old, rather than their usual limit of up to 30 year old cars. People happy with 30 yeor old cars will only start to have problems car shopping in the 2060s
It is so patently ridiculous, when you are trying to sell old junk BEV as a superior product, while it can't even remotely do what previous ICE with similar age was able to do. People does not understand why they should use inferior product - junk BEV with burnt out battery - and that's the reason why they will be actively detracting any kind of green effort, because current policies are leaving those people behind. Frankly it seems to me that majority of society will be left behind by insensitive and expensive green policies.
The ban on new petrol vehicles seems likely to result in more older (higher-emission) vehicles remaining on the road for longer, as EVs still remain 'toys for the wealthy', far too expensive for the working class (who rely on inexpensive used cars).
It's unclear what the used EV market is going to look like longer-term in terms of pricing, degraded battery packs, and reduced range, and availability of repair/servicing for a vehicle that's now a 'tech product' full of software locks, that can only be repaired by authorised dealers, rather than by any skilled mechanic.
It's also unclear how governments are going to tax EV users to recoup the huge amount of fuel tax lost from the switch to EVs...
However, what choice does she have? Any used EV will have a range of 50 miles, and that is after a full 8 hour charge. Fixing/replacing the battery will cost far more than the vehicle itself.
More recent EVs 2nd-hand price is still higher than a new petrol-based one.
I can't see how the market can support itself, without efforts to create batteries that can be recycled easily, but the manufacturers don't seem to have an interest in that.
It might be that more recent cars retain their range better after 10 years, but then they may also retain their price.
The ban has already been brought forward in multiple jurisdictions, that's the general trend, as people realise all the lies they've been told about EVs aren't true, so delaying it would be very surprising. In London, they have the low emission zones on top of that, so any poor person buying an old ICE car for use in London would be paying hefty sums to drive around.
There's multiple serious efforts to build large-scale public (and private) EV charging infrastructure. Why do you think there isn't? How can you think that? They're popping up everywhere.
The ban doesn't even ban PHEVs currently (though there's reasonable chance that it will be strengenthed in some way as the transition accelerates) so even ignoring all EVs with lower TCO than equivalent ICE cars available today, which will be 8 years old in 2030, there's also tons of hybrids for these poor people to buy.
Degraded battery packs? Now that's a classic, thought that one had died out, along with "toys for the wealthy".
The "fuel tax" is more than made up for by all the many benefits of EV (less pollution being a key one) that society gets, but it's good that governments will probably tax EVs as cars, even EVs, have multiple negative externalities that the people who use them should pay for, so the people cycling or on the train don't need to pay for other people's bad decisions. Otherwise we'll end up with inefficient American sprawl rather than healthy, livable cities.
Do car batteries not degrade? How are they different from other batteries?
> The "fuel tax" is more than made up for by all the many benefits of EV
From the government's perspective, it's lost cash flow.
https://storage.googleapis.com/geotab-sandbox/ev-battery-deg...
In the UK, the government also pays for the dementia and asthma that the car pollution creates, and importing the fuels is a cost, as is the lost efficiency, cost of meeting net zero targets and upgrading the grid (which EVs help with) so it evens out.
As I say, they'll probably start taxing them anyway, and thats good, London has a "Congestion Charge" so exceptions for EV make sense as a short term incentive, but they still cause "congestion" and should still pay.
From the curves in your link, it seems EVs have fewer cycles per year than mobile phones or laptops.
But after 15-20 years, their batteries will still most likely be dead.
We can expect battery tech to improve in the next 8 years, and hopefully become cheaper, but a move to EVs could still drastically limit availability of cheap vehicles for those who need them.
Removing private cars from cities won't revolutionise them, when the roads are still going to be full of commercial vehicles, buses, and taxis. Yeah, it'll make it somewhat safer for cyclists and reduce air pollution and noise a little - but not enough to turn a declining urban dystopia into a desirable place to live.
Unless of course, you're very wealthy and can live in a luxury apartment with good security and plenty of distance from the 'rough areas'.
That sounds pretty revolutionary to me already? Why don't you think so?
There's lots of existing plans to improve those other things too, pedestrian only zones, car-free superblocks, e-cargo bikes replacing some commercial vehicles, bike shares, subways and metro systems, bus rapid transit corridors, seperated bike-lanes, mixed-usage districts so that people have everything they need within a walkable radius.
Plan for cars and you get cars, plan for people and you get people.
Even if I accept your premise that cities are descending into "Escape from New York" territory, how does allowing ICE cars to spew pollution do anything but make that worse?
Do you have a source for that? Here in NYC things seem as popular as ever, with record-breaking rents due to high demand. Is it different elsewhere?
Regardless, even if it's true that some cities are struggling, that only makes it more important for them to focus on improving quality of life: a rise in WFH means people have more options, and a city that doesn't want to depopulate has to be an attractive place to live independent of economic opportunity.
More than two thirds of car owners in the UK have access to off-street parking. Many people who do not have such access don't have a car in the first place.
This part of outer West London is particularly suburban, I would expect that number to be even higher there.
I would also expect a very substantial number of slow lamp-post chargers suitable for over-night charging to be installed instead of DC fast chargers.
Computer has spoken.
At this price (20x of solar cost in sunny regions) solar panels even in UK look like a great business. A square meter panel costs $200 and generates 200 watt. Say only half - 100 watt - in UK. That is 0.64kWh per 8 hour day. I.e. $0.50/day at those prices - basically a crypto level of ROI - 400 days. Wind, especially in the ocean, is even better.
I wonder if the current energy crisis - and thus the resulting increased prices providing much better ROI for green investment - would move the world to green economy more than anything else before. In some paradoxical sense Russia attacking Ukraine is what may prove to be the biggest driver for greening of our civilization.
Compared to that, data centres out in West London, in an "industrial shed" in the vicinity of Heathrow Airport, are already "moved out".
> In its note, the [Greater London Authority] said pressure on the grid in west London has been particularly acute because a number of data centres have been built nearby in recent years, taking advantage of fibre optic cables that run along the M4 corridor, before crossing the Atlantic.
Maybe elsewhere is cheaper, but an area with warehouses is cheap enough, in a sense.
I found Heathrow too, so I assume noise depresses the pricing. But servers don't mind aircraft noise.
You think Heathrow's presence depresses land pricing close to the airport?
For light industrial and warehouses, the opposite.
(Full disclosure: also years ago I did some consulting work for the airport. There are some very strange incentives at play at LHR which may not be apparent to outsiders.)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jun/16/sipson-h...
With less confidence, I vaguely remember a discussion with a datacentre technician at one of these sites who said something about the curvature of the cabling which can impact latency/speed for high frequency trading outfits located in the datacentres. I'm not sure in which direction this would worsen but perhaps another factor.
The problem with moving too far out is that you end up with even greater problems of having your data centre miles from any major fibre backbone. It's a similar reason why a lot of broadcasting studios and other network hubs used to be based close to the BT tower despite that being hugely expensive real estate.
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
John Betjeman
The whole point of these exercises is not to save energy but to engage the population to believe that they are part of the problem and therefore part of the solution. They are not.
One of the most important videos on the entire Internet, if you cannot understand why then you are probably already lost.
Solar wouldn't even be particularly useful for peak compensation, as generally the UK peaks fall on winter evenings, while solar only makes useful power in summer.
A better solution would be just the batteries. If these buildings had enough battery storage to compensate for usage during the few peak usage hours per day, the effect of new buildings on the grid would be negligible (as the grid is basically underutilised for most of the day). Then the solar could be built much more cost effectively in a field out of the city.
NYC is also over 1000 miles closer to the equator than London is. People forget how far north the UK is, the vast majority of the population in Quebec lives further south than the most southern point in the UK.
Huge tower block going up right near where I live. New houses in front of me, and more planned behind in the next 5 years.
Very few of those homes will be affordable. So while there will be more people packed into the same area, it won't really help the urban homeless.