Possibly some form of regulation regarding payment may be useful as well. Do companies really need to require you to have an account and sign upto each one? What’s the problem with just having a standard credit/debit card payment (via preauthorisation) as is standard with petrol stations now.
Data is king and a lot of networks also charge a subscription. Chip and pin machines on every pump is kinda expensive but well within the realms of what is possible but for simple 7kw posts they could increase the complexity somewhat. There is also the risk of attacking skimming machines like they do on cash points and it also makes them easier to vandalise (which is a problem).
What about the environment impact of these batteries? We know that they don't last long, just like our mobile phones. If these batteries wear out after a few years use, can these batteries be recycled or be safely disposed of? Also replacing batteries for owners will cost thousands.
Just surprised that there is very little information of this everywhere I read about electric vehicles. Also that they don't last well in colder weather and what about that you may need to use evening headlights and heating on etc? Again, I don't see any information on this as well.
Just like coffee cups, Li-Ion batters *can* be recycled, they generally just are not yet. There is a few reasons for this, it just isn't worth it for commodity cells that you get in consumer electronics. Too small, require a lot of disassembly and are not normally funnelled into recycling channels. Recycling requires volume and there are also not enough old EV's out there to worth specifically setting up plants to recycle them. The likely hood of any batteries that are not damaged actually making to to a recycling facility is also slim at the moment. For instance even an ancient Leaf battery with 70% capacity still has 16.8kwh capacity. That's 3kwh more than an Tesla Powerwall 2 and could power my house completely off grid for 1.5 days. Re-using is far better than recycling.
Applications for battery storage are coming on-line all of the time and most do not have the need for the battery to be dense and are perfect to re-use old cells, Nissan are building shipping container sized batteries using old Leaf packs and deploying them in industrial applications. People are taking wrecked cars and taking the batteries to do the same thing for DIY domestic installations and converting classic cars to EV.
A 50% range drop in winter is very extreme for a decent EV with temperature management and almost all of them can pre-heat the battery, 20-30% is much more normal. Norway seem to manage just fine and they have a much colder climate than ours especially in winter.
You also don't need more to massively increase the UK's peek generating capability via building power stations, even the national grid say that. They also say the transmission network can handle it in its current state, but some parts of the grid may need to be upgraded like a motorway service stations. Offshore wind, solar and energy storage will pick up most of the slack in the UK. Offshore wind is also way cheaper than nuclear and its cheaper than new gas generation, batters are cheaper for dealing with peek demand and can also react within a few tenths of a second rather than a few minutes of spooling up a power station (which is incredibly expensive per k/mwh of generation, they are also paid to sit in standby mode). Have a look at the effect the big Tesla battery is having in South Australia.
National Grid do say that charging will need to get smarter though. Have a look at a product called the 'Zappi charger', imagine that but rather than just looking at your own solar and energy tariff it looks at what is happening on the grid and charges the car with a dynamic charge rate depending on grid load.
