The short answer is yes, don’t worry about it.
There will need to be some upgrades, no one is denying that but in the grand schemes of the grid they are pretty minor. These will mainly be for installing rapid charging hubs rather than home chargers.
The grid (aka the distribution part of the network) is sized to go well beyond our peek demand which is only a couple of hours a day. Outside of that peek there is huge amounts of capacity in the network. If everyone plugged in their cars are 5pm, then yes there will be a problem but that is not a realistic scenario and it can be easily mitigated with behavioural nudges and incentives (e.g. cheaper rates at night).
If you also look at the UKs electricity consumption over the last couple of decades, it’s been dropping steadily for years despite adding about 5 million to the population in that time and things like electric cars starting to come onboard.
Generation is a slightly different conversation, at peak times there have been a few instances where things have been a bit tight following a perfect storm of circumstances, the interconnect to France caught fire, the wind dropped dramatically and a few power stations were unexpectedly down for maintenance. Otherwise it’s generally fine and outside of peak times there is generally a huge amount of capacity.
This is something with is evolving all the time, with new interconnects to the continent coming online, huge wind farms going up in the North Sea, new nuclear but also some of fossil plants being mothballed.
Likewise if there is a power cut, you can’t also get petrol. Most people drive less than 25 miles a day, even the EVs with the smallest battery on the market now have an average of 4-5 days of charge in them.
There will need to be some upgrades, no one is denying that but in the grand schemes of the grid they are pretty minor. These will mainly be for installing rapid charging hubs rather than home chargers.
The grid (aka the distribution part of the network) is sized to go well beyond our peek demand which is only a couple of hours a day. Outside of that peek there is huge amounts of capacity in the network. If everyone plugged in their cars are 5pm, then yes there will be a problem but that is not a realistic scenario and it can be easily mitigated with behavioural nudges and incentives (e.g. cheaper rates at night).
If you also look at the UKs electricity consumption over the last couple of decades, it’s been dropping steadily for years despite adding about 5 million to the population in that time and things like electric cars starting to come onboard.
Generation is a slightly different conversation, at peak times there have been a few instances where things have been a bit tight following a perfect storm of circumstances, the interconnect to France caught fire, the wind dropped dramatically and a few power stations were unexpectedly down for maintenance. Otherwise it’s generally fine and outside of peak times there is generally a huge amount of capacity.
This is something with is evolving all the time, with new interconnects to the continent coming online, huge wind farms going up in the North Sea, new nuclear but also some of fossil plants being mothballed.
Likewise if there is a power cut, you can’t also get petrol. Most people drive less than 25 miles a day, even the EVs with the smallest battery on the market now have an average of 4-5 days of charge in them.
