Smart meters (again?)

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kwackers
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by kwackers »

PDQ Mobile wrote:And however you spin it, it means you have emissions too for every mile you drive, whether you believe it or not.

The numbers have been crunched time and time again, unless you live in the right part of Poland EV's are significantly greener than IC.
That's obviously not to say they're green - no car ever will be but until we can wean ourselves off them and produce viable alternatives...

IIRC they make up for the cost of manufacture by about 50,000 miles - which means if you drive 'old stinky' for another 50,000 miles you'll be on par with having bought and driven a brand new EV.
(And in truth it'll be somewhat less than that since older cars aren't as efficient and clean as newer cars.)
One other point is that the cost of manufacture assumes the car is scrap at end of life. But for EV's the batteries have value and are being used for storage both in houses and commercially, this potentially gives them another couple of decades of life which isn't accounted for in the above 'sums', a life which consists of making it easier to store and use wind and solar...

The final point is that the "green mix" of energy is always improving.
So in 5 years time an EV bought today will be greener.
OTOH a five year old IC will have more wear and tear on its engine and engine management components and will be dirtier.
Jdsk
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by Jdsk »

kwackers wrote:EV threads out there in the social media world always remind me of bicycle threads.
Someone mentions an EV (bicycle) and the next thing the thread is loaded with folk spouting the same old nonsense - doesn't matter how much you debunk it, it simply doesn't go away.

However one thing I've learned from such threads is that everyone and their dog needs a car that can do at least 600 miles on a single charge and charge in 2 minutes otherwise there's no point and if those drivers stop for a break (apparently most don't need one) then it's only for a couple of minutes and they're good to go.

Personally I call bllcks.
Almost nobody regularly drives 600 miles. The vast majority of the car fleet in this country probably rarely goes 20 miles from home with really long journeys happening very infrequently.
Roadside survey after survey has shown this to be true.

If I was going to drive 1000 miles then rather than use "old stinky" I'd hire a nice car - a modern car with decent fuel economy and clean emissions.
They're actually quite cheap to hire and the cost of hiring one is probably equivalent to the savings I make in a single month.
However I fully expect in the lifetime of my vehicle never to have to do that.

In the meantime should I need to drive any distance then stopping for a 30 minute break every 2 - 3 hours of driving to charge and have a rest is probably nothing short of a public service.

Of course the early adopters aren't typical users but from I what can gather:
* Range anxiety decreases after purchase.
* A vast amount of charging is done at home rather than anywhere else
* Not going to the garage to fill up is a useful benefit.

Jonathan
Jdsk
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by Jdsk »

PDQ Mobile wrote:Are all charging points the same plugs across Europe?

I learnt from this forum that they nearly all are, except for Superchargers:
https://forum.cyclinguk.org/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=140166&hilit=ev+charging+plug

Jonathan
Jdsk
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by Jdsk »

kwackers wrote:One other point is that the cost of manufacture assumes the car is scrap at end of life. But for EV's the batteries have value and are being used for storage both in houses and commercially, this potentially gives them another couple of decades of life which isn't accounted for in the above 'sums', a life which consists of making it easier to store and use wind and solar...

And battery recycling as well as secondary use will be massive RSN.

Jonathan
PDQ Mobile
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by PDQ Mobile »

kwackers wrote:OTOH a five year old IC will have more wear and tear on its engine and engine management components and will be dirtier.

What's engine management. :shock:
PDQ Mobile
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by PDQ Mobile »

kwackers wrote:The numbers have been crunched time and time again, unless you live in the right part of Poland EV's are significantly greener than IC.
That's obviously not to say they're green - no car ever will be but until we can wean ourselves off them and produce viable alternatives...

IIRC they make up for the cost of manufacture by about 50,000 miles - which means if you drive 'old stinky' for another 50,000 miles you'll be on par with having bought and driven a brand new EV.
(And in truth it'll be somewhat less than that since older cars aren't as efficient and clean as newer cars.)
One other point is that the cost of manufacture assumes the car is scrap at end of life. But for EV's the batteries have value and are being used for storage both in houses and commercially, this potentially gives them another couple of decades of life which isn't accounted for in the above 'sums', a life which consists of making it easier to store and use wind and solar...

The final point is that the "green mix" of energy is always improving.
So in 5 years time an EV bought today will be greener.
OTOH a five year old IC will have more wear and tear on its engine and engine management components and will be dirtier.

On a more serious note.
I am not convinced by the figures.
They surely come through the rose tinted specs of the EV industry.
And I am not convinced by the optimism about the recycling of batteries. Nasty heavy metals that they are- most undesirable in any food chain.
I have been around long enough to take the claims of many new "technologies" with a healthy pinch of salt.

Old and (not so) stinky" has proved her worth in terms of my pocket and a fantastic reliability record. £800 to buy and for that money 13 years of average motoring take some beating.

I hope you have the same success with your partly wind driven wheels.
They will have to last a very long time indeed.

We need pioneers like yourself for sure, a bit like the solar stuff we debated before. Bit slanted financially towards those with high incomes was my view.
The pricing structures you quote for leccy fall into that too I think.
I can understand them giving it away at times of surplus but to pay people to use it smacks of something wrong with the system.
For other poorer customers then have to pay?
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[XAP]Bob
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by [XAP]Bob »

PDQ Mobile wrote:
kwackers wrote:The numbers have been crunched time and time again, unless you live in the right part of Poland EV's are significantly greener than IC.

On a more serious note.
I am not convinced by the figures.
They surely come through the rose tinted specs of the EV industry.



Erm - no. They are frequently calculated whilst giving every possible advantage to the ICE.

And I am not convinced by the optimism about the recycling of batteries. Nasty heavy metals that they are- most undesirable in any food chain.

Sorry - where do recycling plants put stuff into the food chain? If they are doing that then they aren't actually recycling. The amount of battery that can be recycled is virtually all - and given the current increase in battery production there are serious economic drivers towards recycling.
You are also no doubt thinking about the battery in an EV as a monolithic giant AA battery, which isn't the case.

[youtube]Ws9Y1be8N-U[/youtube]

I have been around long enough to take the claims of many new "technologies" with a healthy pinch of salt.

Old and (not so) stinky" has proved her worth in terms of my pocket and a fantastic reliability record. £800 to buy and for that money 13 years of average motoring take some beating.

So what is "old and stinky" because if you want to complain about the costs of new cars then comparing them with second hand cars is hardly reasonable.
13 years and you've never changed oil, brake pads, tyres, paid VED, no fuel costs?
There are more than a few things missing from your calculation.

I hope you have the same success with your partly wind driven wheels.
They will have to last a very long time indeed.

And the evidence is that they will outlast ICE vehicles - because there is that much less to go wrong.
The individual modules of the batteries can be replaced if needed, but there is one moving part in the engine - and a transmission with fixed gearing.

We need pioneers like yourself for sure, a bit like the solar stuff we debated before. Bit slanted financially towards those with high incomes was my view.
The pricing structures you quote for leccy fall into that too I think.
I can understand them giving it away at times of surplus but to pay people to use it smacks of something wrong with the system.
For other poorer customers then have to pay?


The pricing structure for electricity actually emerges because power stations don't spin up or down all that easily... It has been the case for decades at least that large users of electricity (like the aluminium industry for example) are paid to turn off their systems at some times, and actively paid to use surplus (to the rest of the grid) energy at others. The Agile tariff simply provides domestic customers with the benefit that has long been available to the larger consumers...

Any financial incentive scheme always benefits those with high income more in an absolute sense:
https://www.moore.co.uk/msuk/old-moore- ... er-analogy

I am tempted to nab a home storage battery and run the agile tariff. If I could control the battery properly then I could end paying nothing for electricity, either domestically or for transport - and that's the point at which storage makes financial sense - but it requires the capital investment. As more people do the same you end up flattening the grid load, such that the price difference eventually closes, but that's a *good* thing for the grid overall, and the early adopters get their benefit early and contribute to a better grid in the process.

As we move towards a smart grid this is one of the serious ways forward.
I'd like to see the container sized 500kW - 1MW nuclear reactors all over the place, with a battery bank alongside. It would make the grid far more distributed (which would lower transmission losses even further, and the caseload + storage combination gives huge flexibility.
The disadvantage is the loss of the inertial grid stabilisation from all the massive generators, but batteries are capable of responding fast enough that that isn't a huge issue - assuming you have enough battery capacity to deal with those transient loads (which we would)
A shortcut has to be a challenge, otherwise it would just be the way. No situation is so dire that panic cannot make it worse.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those can extrapolate from incomplete data.
kwackers
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by kwackers »

PDQ Mobile wrote:On a more serious note.
I am not convinced by the figures.
They surely come through the rose tinted specs of the EV industry.

Depends which figures you're having issues with.
There's always some spin, it's unavoidable but even without spin it's fairly easy to prove to yourself that an EV is far greener than an IC car particularly over its lifetime.

PDQ Mobile wrote:And I am not convinced by the optimism about the recycling of batteries. Nasty heavy metals that they are- most undesirable in any food chain.

Battery recycling is a fairly new thing. But the numbers are from the recycling companies themselves - I'm not sure they have a reason to put spin on them nor whether they're capable of doing so.
But using the term "heavy metals" doesn't really tell you anything other than make it sound bad. In truth it's not actually that hard to separate and reuse the materials - prior to cars there was less incentive because most of the devices only held a couple of hundred grams of the stuff in a hard to extract container. Cars otoh have significant quantities in easy to get at packages.
Plus it should be fairly easy to work out what's going in and what's going out of a recycling plant.

It's not like IC cars have much to shout about either.
You any idea how many oil spills there are each year from ships carting your preferred energy source around? We don't hear about them because they're so common that unless they destroy hundreds of miles (rather than tens of miles) of coast nobody cares.
Then the use of cobalt to refine your fuel - at least the cobalt used in batteries is reducing towards zero and recoverable unlike that used in the fuel refining process.
What about your waste oil - carcinogenic and apparently according to the water providers it's still often poured down drains.

PDQ Mobile wrote:I have been around long enough to take the claims of many new "technologies" with a healthy pinch of salt.

And long enough to be comfortable and happily ignorant about what you know. ;)

PDQ Mobile wrote:We need pioneers like yourself for sure, a bit like the solar stuff we debated before. Bit slanted financially towards those with high incomes was my view.

By high incomes you probably mean not the bottom percentiles, a lot of new cars are bought by people on average incomes, but if it wasn't for them you not only wouldn't find a second hand car for £800, you wouldn't find a second hand car at all.

I can understand them giving it away at times of surplus but to pay people to use it smacks of something wrong with the system.
For other poorer customers then have to pay?

I honestly don't think you understand how this works.

There's the equivalent of a stock market for energy. You go 'online' and bid for the energy you need. If there's too much available energy then the generators need to be shut off and their operators compensated as per the contract they agreed before they signed up to build the plant.
That price can be negative or it can be as much as £1 a unit.

If I get paid 10p for every unit of energy I use the supplier is getting paid 20p so they're still making 10p from me - so how exactly am I subsiding you?
When the price hits 25p then I'm paying 35p - how much are you paying? Less than that so I'm actually subsidising you!
I *always* pay more than the going rate whereas you don't, therefore you can't possibly be subsidising me but I could be subsidising you.

Closing down power stations because folk aren't using enough electricity costs money, restarting them costs money.
Paying someone to use the power so they don't close costs less, if you can encourage them to not use power during peak times and shift their usage to off peak then it's a double gain.
By using that electricity during the night I'm actually saving you the cost of shutting down and restarting power stations - I'd say that counts as a subsidy. (Most of the time the power is cheap rather than less than zero).


If you want "unfair" then my EV doesn't use oil and yet the oil companies worldwide receive hundreds of billions to trillions in subsidies - which means I'm subsidising you and "old stinky" through my taxes.
PDQ Mobile
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by PDQ Mobile »

^^both above^^
So many points to attempt to answer!
Firstly I feel perfectly entitled to compare my motoring costs with anyone's vehicle.
It is a simple and totally valid comparison of what motoring actually costs.

The low purchase price gives loads of room for the other stuff mentioned including fuel.
Of course there are considerable running and servicing costs, though I do my own "everything".
That is why the thing lasts so long.

VED is a sore point. Perfectly good older cars have practically disappeared from our roads because without a CO2 rating tax is levied at high rates.
And it is a lot of money, even if emissions are good.
Who is subsidizing who here?

Neither of you have stated the purchase (or lease) price of your vehicles so meaningful comparison is impossible.
But I have my suspicions that it represents either a big wodge or a hefty monthly outgoing.

On the leccy pricing point I do feel out of my depth.
Sounds a bit like negative interest rates, where one has to pay the bank for deposited money- a legalized robbery and a turning on it's head of all I was brought up to expect.

My leccy costs it's 17 odd p a kwh (plus 5%Vat).
I use it wisely and I think it probably represents reasonable value.
And Scot Power make a small profit though sometimes I wonder how!!

I have to say watching all those tariffs looks like a bit of a nightmare to a simple soul like me. I have rather more interesting ways to spend my time. Like cycling!

Not sure about the switching (powering down) of power stations argument.
Gas turbine (a huge proportion of UK leccy) and hydro (both normal and pumped storage) are quickly reduced. A day with an eye on Grid Watch will confirm that to anyone.

So sure there's surplus power (sometimes) in windy times, but to PAY someone to use it rather than just GIVE it for free is beyond me, in spite of you trying patiently to explain, Kwackers.

A simple life in all areas is what I have long aspired too.
Too simple maybe.
sjs
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by sjs »

Jdsk wrote:
kwackers wrote:EV threads out there in the social media world always remind me of bicycle threads.
Someone mentions an EV (bicycle) and the next thing the thread is loaded with folk spouting the same old nonsense - doesn't matter how much you debunk it, it simply doesn't go away.

However one thing I've learned from such threads is that everyone and their dog needs a car that can do at least 600 miles on a single charge and charge in 2 minutes otherwise there's no point and if those drivers stop for a break (apparently most don't need one) then it's only for a couple of minutes and they're good to go.

Personally I call bllcks.
Almost nobody regularly drives 600 miles. The vast majority of the car fleet in this country probably rarely goes 20 miles from home with really long journeys happening very infrequently.
Roadside survey after survey has shown this to be true.

If I was going to drive 1000 miles then rather than use "old stinky" I'd hire a nice car - a modern car with decent fuel economy and clean emissions.
They're actually quite cheap to hire and the cost of hiring one is probably equivalent to the savings I make in a single month.
However I fully expect in the lifetime of my vehicle never to have to do that.

In the meantime should I need to drive any distance then stopping for a 30 minute break every 2 - 3 hours of driving to charge and have a rest is probably nothing short of a public service.

Of course the early adopters aren't typical users but from I what can gather:
* Range anxiety decreases after purchase.
* A vast amount of charging is done at home rather than anywhere else
* Not going to the garage to fill up is a useful benefit.

Jonathan


This is all true, but, as a recent adopter of a Tesla Model 3, I did find the relative sparseness of charging opportunities a bit of a pain while on holiday this summer. No regrets about getting it, and no problem with routine home charging, even from a standard domestic socket, but waiting for an hour to charge at 45 kW, or finding the only charger at a filling station already occupied, is no one's idea of fun.
Jdsk
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by Jdsk »

Thanks: all experiences welcomed as we approach making a decision.

Jonathan
kwackers
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by kwackers »

PDQ Mobile wrote:I have to say watching all those tariffs looks like a bit of a nightmare to a simple soul like me. I have rather more interesting ways to spend my time. Like cycling!

As I said I don't have to watch them, I just plug the car in when I'm not using it.
If power is cheap it'll charge if not it won't.

PDQ Mobile wrote:Not sure about the switching (powering down) of power stations argument.
Gas turbine (a huge proportion of UK leccy) and hydro (both normal and pumped storage) are quickly reduced. A day with an eye on Grid Watch will confirm that to anyone.

They know in advance what is going to be spun up or down.
That's how Octopus get to tell you what the price will be for the next day or so (and in fact there are a number of AI based systems that make fairly accurate predictions based on previous demand and weather reports so if you accept some small amount of error you can look much further ahead).

PDQ Mobile wrote:So sure there's surplus power (sometimes) in windy times, but to PAY someone to use it rather than just GIVE it for free is beyond me, in spite of you trying patiently to explain, Kwackers.

Which tells me you don't fully understand.

What's the point of just giving away some energy free?
You won't know you've got it free until you see your bill and even if you knew you might be getting some what would you do with it?
How would giving folk free energy occasionally at night balance the grid or prevent power stations being spun down?

My charger is intelligent and my car can store energy for future use.
Being able to balance the grid and help prevent power stations being spun down is inherent in its design.

It's all about changing how folk use energy.
When the anti-EV brigade bang on about how there's not enough electricity and EV's will be bringing blackouts etc it's because they don't get this bit.

Because the pricing drops when there's too much energy as an EV owner I'm incentivised to change how I use energy.
If it didn't then I wouldn't bother, I'd simply charge when I got in from work - at peak time along with every other EV owner.

The flip side is because I've opted to pay a tracked amount for my electricity if the price goes up then I have to pay that too - but you seem to ignore that bit.
To me it's worth it, especially as I make an effort not to use electricity during peak times.
(Prior to changing to this tariff my wife would often fire her kiln immediately after she'd filled it in the early evening, since it pulls 12Kw that's definitely not a good thing. Now it gets fired overnight using cheap electricity. So the system works).


I paid 24k for my car. A quick look online says you can buy the model below (pre-registered) which has a few less toys for 20k.
If you buy it monthly you can pick it up for £240 a month with no deposit.
For a fairly decent sized car that's not bad, knock off the fuel savings and it's cheaper than an equivalent IC engined car - not to mention vastly nicer to drive and in 10 years it'll probably hold it's value far better than a similarly priced IC car).

Second hand you can get a 10 year old Leaf for around £6k. If your mileage is mainly local in the 60-80 mile range then it would happily do you.
Stretch the payments over 4 years and you're looking at around £140 or so a month - knock off the fuel savings, tax, cheap servicing etc and you don't need to run it much to be cheaper than an IC car. (And if you drive in and out of the big smoke you'd be quid's in).
What's more you can probably drive the car for a few years and sell it for not much less than you paid for it. From what I've seen the "final value" of an EV is determined by the potential savings that can be had.
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[XAP]Bob
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by [XAP]Bob »

PDQ Mobile wrote:^^both above^^
So many points to attempt to answer!
Firstly I feel perfectly entitled to compare my motoring costs with anyone's vehicle.
It is a simple and totally valid comparison of what motoring actually costs.


Absolutely - but let's be fair about it. Let's not compare the purchase price of a car that is already ten years old with a car that is new.
And let's add in servicing costs (including your time at an appropriate rate) as well as just your "mature market" second (more likely fourth) hand cost.

My car - an MG ZS EV isn't the best EV on the market by a long stretch, but it does 4m/kWh around town, and ~3.3 sat at 70mph.

I did a lot of number crunching before I entered into the lease agreement, and over the three year lease I am going to spend ~£210 *more* than I did by running older second hand vehicles. That includes all of my outgoings, including depreciation, on running cars around 100k miles old.

I compromised on space, so I have to take the wheels off my wheelchair to put it in the boot - but given that the driver assistance features have massively extended the time I can drive (from two hours to three, maybe even more) I'm more than happy with the marginal extra cost and the increased driving range I have, and the security of knowing that there is no way of getting any surprise bills.

This is a slightly unfair comparison, partly because I am talking about the cost of running an old vehicle against the cost of leasing a new one - but mostly because the Motability scheme isn't open to anyone.

The low purchase price gives loads of room for the other stuff mentioned including fuel.
Of course there are considerable running and servicing costs, though I do my own "everything".
That is why the thing lasts so long.

So you assume that your time has no value when determining how much the car costs you - which is fine if tinkering is a hobby, but realise that that doesn't translate to the vast majority of people, so you need to factor in those hours at sensible labour rates.
I used to do a fair amount of work on my vehicles, but I gradually did less and less as time became more limited than money.

VED is a sore point. Perfectly good older cars have practically disappeared from our roads because without a CO2 rating tax is levied at high rates.
And it is a lot of money, even if emissions are good.
Who is subsidizing who here?

Erm - have you looked at the subsidy figures?
Motorists are subsidised by about ten billion pounds a year.

Neither of you have stated the purchase (or lease) price of your vehicles so meaningful comparison is impossible.
But I have my suspicions that it represents either a big wodge or a hefty monthly outgoing.

I haven't - because it's a lease... fairly easy to work out how much I pay, but I have broken it down above... over three years it will cost me ~£210 more than my old car(s), but is much more pleasant in the meantime.

On the leccy pricing point I do feel out of my depth.
Sounds a bit like negative interest rates, where one has to pay the bank for deposited money- a legalized robbery and a turning on it's head of all I was brought up to expect.

My leccy costs it's 17 odd p a kwh (plus 5%Vat).
I use it wisely and I think it probably represents reasonable value.
And Scot Power make a small profit though sometimes I wonder how!!

I have to say watching all those tariffs looks like a bit of a nightmare to a simple soul like me. I have rather more interesting ways to spend my time. Like cycling!

17p/kWh is above average, significantly so.
The concept of time based energy pricing isn't new, that's what E7 and E10 were all about, but the recent advances in communications has meant that even domestic customers can now benefit from using power when the market has a predicted excess of supply/demand.

Not sure about the switching (powering down) of power stations argument.
Gas turbine (a huge proportion of UK leccy) and hydro (both normal and pumped storage) are quickly reduced. A day with an eye on Grid Watch will confirm that to anyone.

Hydro can - yes, and they do, but there are costs and timescales associated with spinning down a gas turbine, and with a grid that needs to balance power on an ongoing basis... it's often cheaper to sell electricity at negative cost.

So sure there's surplus power (sometimes) in windy times, but to PAY someone to use it rather than just GIVE it for free is beyond me, in spite of you trying patiently to explain, Kwackers.


That's how capitalism works.
If I have something that can only be used a specific time, and it must be used then it might be necessary to pay people to use it. You could argue that "free" should be incentive enough - but that's not the way the market works.

Let's try a roundabout analogy...
If you have 10 apples in your shop, and they will all go off tonight, and it costs £1/apple for proper disposal then would you pay someone 50p to take an apple in the last few minutes before the shop closes? Of course you would - that's just saved you 50p per apple.

Simple
A shortcut has to be a challenge, otherwise it would just be the way. No situation is so dire that panic cannot make it worse.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those can extrapolate from incomplete data.
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by PDQ Mobile »

^^kwackers
I still don't understand. Sorry.

What's the point of giving it away over paying you to use it- the overall profit is more if they just give it you, surely?

And I am not ignoring the fact that sometimes you pay a good deal more than standard tariff.

Are you suggesting that PAYING YOU to use lots at some low demand times, off-sets the premium you pay at peak demand?
If so that still doesn't make sense to me. They might as well just reduce your top tariff?

Free is obviously not an option for a "normal" tariff consumer, but cheaper could be!!

As for costings, I can tell you that £240 a month is way too much for my meagre income.
And while the EV may be quite cheap to run there ARE other costs.
And some of those are environmental, similar to an ICE vehicle.

I am sure that the future of urban transport needs will be a substantial amount of EV vehicles.
I welcome it from a sustainable energy and pollution perspective though as I have suggested I don't think the balance is so entirely loaded in EV's favour as some would suggest.

I am much less sure about the long distance and rural sectors though.
We shall see, and it will be interesting.
kwackers
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Re: Smart meters (again?)

Post by kwackers »

PDQ Mobile wrote:What's the point of giving it away over paying you to use it- the overall profit is more if they just give it you, surely?

Because the whole point of the tariff I'm on is it tracks wholesale prices.

Octopus are pretty open about it, I pay 2.2x the wholesale price (plus 13p extra at peak times capped to 35p).

This isn't a special deal for me, you're perfectly entitled to have it too.
In fact I posted the link above somewhere - sign up and we'll both get £50 each (you might still get £100, don't know if that deal is finished yet) :wink: .


PDQ Mobile wrote:Are you suggesting that PAYING YOU to use lots at some low demand times, off-sets the premium you pay at peak demand?
If so that still doesn't make sense to me. They might as well just reduce your top tariff?

Because then there'd be no incentive for me to use power when there was too much and reduce my usage when there was less.

[XAP]Bob wrote:My car - an MG ZS EV isn't the best EV on the market by a long stretch, but it does 4m/kWh around town, and ~3.3 sat at 70mph.

Looks like me and Bob have the same car - hope it's a blue one.
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