Government gears up £30m to promote charging points

Carl Mortished, World Business Editor
Electric cars and unreliable wind power could bring down Britain’s electricity network, National Grid said as the Government launched a £30 million grant scheme to promote the installation of charging points for plug-in cars.
Steve Holliday, National Grid chief executive, said that without smart meters in homes and an intelligent system to balance supply and demand, the network would be unable to cope.
“To make this possible, we need a smart grid,” he said. “You can’t have lots of renewable energy [and] lots of electric vehicles — you can’t have all that without smart grids.”
At peak demand periods in the early evening when commuters return home, the recharging of batteries on a fleet of more than a million electric cars would pile pressure on the system and raise electricity costs, says National Grid, the owner of Britain’s electricity network. “Power stations which service peak demand will tend to be more expensive, less efficient and more polluting,” it said.

A big part of the solution to the potential peak demand overload, said Mr Holliday, would lie in the car’s battery, which would act as a power source for the grid, in peak periods.
A smart meter would enable a household to supply power to the grid from a car battery between 5pm and 7pm, when lighting, heating and domestic appliance use creates peak demand. The power flow would then reverse during the night when the battery would be charged up cheaply at low electricity tariffs.
The cost of installing smart meters could be as high as £500 per household, according to estimates from Ernst & Young, the accounting firm. It believes that it would cost 50 per cent more than Government estimates of a £9 billion bill for hooking up every home in the UK to a smart grid.
Government plans for Pluggedin-Places — up to six cities or regions with charging points for electric cars — were outlined yesterday by Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary. He called for a series of civic and private sector partnerships to compete for £30 million in government grants. Groups of investors will be asked to match the government funds.
“Our aim is for electric and lowcarbon cars to be an everyday feature of life on UK’s roads in less than five years,” Lord Adonis said.
Charging points have so far proved expensive to install. A public/private project to build 73 charging points cost the Government £500,000.
A fleet of 1.5 million electric cars on the roads in 2020 would create annual demand of 6 terrawatt hours, equivalent to the output of a large power station running 24 hours a day or 2 per cent of current electricity demand.
National Grid reckons that it would take seven hours to charge a typical 22 kwh battery from a household 13 amp socket. However, if a typical commuter drove for only half of the potential 60-mile range, the battery would be half full before charging in the evening, a store of electricity that could be available to the grid.
“The key thing is to have the incentive so that when the tariffs get cheaper, you charge your car,” said a National Grid spokesman.
According to Eurelectric, the EU’s electricity association, the transfer of all private cars to electric power would increase demand by only 10 per cent to 15 per cent. Peter Birkner, chairman of Eurelectric’s networks committee, said: “It’s more an issue for the distribution grid than for generating capacity. We need new business models, smart grids, smart meters and smart regulation.”
A smart grid would need to be developed in Europe to take maximum advantage of differences in peak electricity demand in each country and the availability of wind power in different locations.