UK: EV Charge points could be requirement in all new build homes & street lights - Sensationalist Headlines

New homes in suburban England would need to be fitted with electric car charging points under a government proposal to cut emissions. Ministers also want new street lights to come with charge points wherever there's on-street parking. Details of a sales ban on new conventional petrol and diesel cars by 2040 are also expected to be set out. The strategy comes at a time when the government is facing criticism for failing to reduce carbon emissions. The government's target is to reduce the UK's greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. ... The proposals, announced by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, aim to make it easier to recharge an electric car rather than refuel petrol or diesel vehicles. They include: The need to assess if new homes and offices should be required to install charging points as standard New street lighting columns with on-street parking to have charging points in appropriate locations More money being allocated to fund charging infrastructure. Mr Grayling said the proposed measures would mean the UK having "one of the most comprehensive support packages for zero-emission vehicles in the world". https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44759150

This is great, just wish they'd laid out a more snappy target, like 2030, as other countries have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_banning_fossil_fuel_vehicles

Yeah, what they announced is okay but I agree it's hardly world leading.

There's already a £500 grant available for people buying an EV to get a home charger installed (they are usually around £700 installed), and many manufacturers will contribute another £200 to the cost.

Older homes may not have a sufficient electrical system to handle it. Mine certainly wouldn't, if I were to get a fast charge point for a battery EV installed I'd have to have my entire house rewired from scratch. As it is I have to run the microwave off an extension cord leading into the TV room because the kitchen wall it's supposed to be plugged into shares a 15 amp breaker with my bedroom and that breaker cannot handle my PC, my window AC, and the microwave at the same time. And my place is only ~45 years old. There's a SHITTON of places in Britian so old that they predate electricity itself and are likely to have even more fucky electrical systems in them than what my house has. The cost of installing a fast charge point may simply be too high to retrofit a lot of homes.

hilariously even older houses might actually have a spare high amperage breaker because they may have used some big current sucking appliance back in the day like running a motor on a pump. or they might be so old the electrical system isn't buried in the walls so its easy to just tack on a new breaker and run lines. its increadibly system dependant and that's why its so expensive, when you have a known standard with an exposed electrical system its easy enough to add it in. my worry is this will become urban bloat where everyone builds these but nobody maintains them ever and 90% of them end up getting ripped out after 5-10 years.

You do have a point. In my house we do have an unused circuit that could drive a charge point, but it's supposed to power the central heating/aircon system that stopped working and got ripped out years ago(IT's the single biggest breaker in my box, I think 50 amps at 240 volts since the heat out here is done electrically rather than through natural gas or an oil furnace or whatever, but I'd have to check to be sure, definitely potent enough to fastcharge a battery EV though). If we were to wire it for fast EV charge we'd just be posponing the total electrical overhaul to when we got that replaced. There is a counterpoint to repurposing those depreciated circuits for EV charging, however. They're still gonna need a sparky to give 'em a once-over. They may not be up to code, even if they are, they're going to be very old and components within might not be healthy enough to do the job safely anymore. Definitely cheaper to do tha a total house rewire, though.

EV chargers don't usually connect to existing RCBOs in the house. The general way it's done is to connect straight after the meter, with a new RCBO. As long as the main fuse has some spare capacity it's fine. If it's not a 100 amp fuse most houses can upgrade for free iirc, very few need the cabling replaced.

It's practically something which pays for itself for EV manufacturers as it is one of the hurdles people have to overcome to purchase an EV.

Even considering it's only a ban on new vehicles, 2040 is not much of a commitment, people will still be puttering around in old ICE cars for a very long time after that. Would have been nice to see a quicker stepped implementation requiring both hybrids and electrics and banning "ICE only" vehicle sales much earlier on.

At this rate, the ban won't matter all that much anyway

I'm really happy to see governments supporting such a big push towards EV adoption. I do find it disappointing that possibly, one day, an internal combustion engine will only be an option on classic cars, but still.

maybe code is different in britain but in the US they can either do a double pole charging system which is like you said, a separate panel coming out of the meter, or they can use existing 240 circuits, houses here are being built with excess 240 circuits for this even if they aren't installing charging stations. older refits also usually require you to swap a breaker box out so there's an additional hassel

Hopefully with companies like BP looking to install charging points at their petrol stations the public charging network will be even bigger. A fair amount of EV owners I've spoken to don't or can't charge at home but they still get by.

Given how easily available (and therefore less monitored) charging stations could become I imagine there will be an equal number of shitheads who take steps to vandalise the cables by cutting/damaging them.

Try 30 minutes at most, you won't be doing it that often anyways unless your commute is fairly long.

Workplace charging is increasingly common as well.

Yet in Indiana they're doing there best to stop Hybrid/Electric cars by charging them more with fees out the ass just because they're not using gas. Oh and it's a yearly fee and can go up if they feel like it. I think it's an annual $50 for hybrids and $150 for electric

By not using gas, you're not paying the taxes for road funding, even though you're still putting wear and tear on the road. The easiest way to fix this is with a yearly fee.

Despite our already kind of high fuel taxes, we also pay a yearly emissions based tax on vehicles. Even then my Smart ForTwo is totally exempt from this so for EVs this will have to change. But as it stands the car tax has kept our roads mostly in order.

Oh fuck off. That yearly fee is there to keep EVs off the road as much as possible. Electric ownership is still in a place where it should absolutely be incentivized. If EV owners were to pay less than their "fair share" it would only be a good thing, there aren't nearly enough of them to make that cause a funding problem. You'd be saving what they're not spending tenfold with the other negative externalities of internal combusion vehicle ownership.

Well our funding comes mainly from fuel taxes (which aren't that high) and federal grants. The only taxes you pay on a vehicle is basically the ones when you buy it. Electric ownership absolutely SHOULD be incentivized, but EV owners not paying their "fair share" when it comes to maintaining the very infrastructure they use is not something that is any positive whatsoever. It's like saying companies shouldn't pay taxes to promote growth, and we all know how that ends up. Using 12 gallons of gas a week, you pay $143.52 in fuel taxes a year. Sounds EXACTLY like this is a replacement for the taxes they aren't paying for road maintenance.

Uhhhhh you are aware, car charge ports require a dedicated circuit like an stovetop/AC/dryer. To retrofit, you would just run a line directly to the port, which in most homes the breaker pannel is in the garage so its an easy 15ft pull in an unfinished section. I could wire that in less than 30 minutes. Like 15amp rated wire would either melt the line or the breaker would trip.

No it isn't. It's literally not similar at all. One is a private citizen and the other is a business. Furthermore, tax cuts DO promote growth. The only problem there is that business growing isn't necessarily beneficial to everyone else. EV ownership pretty much unarguably is.

A mileage tax separate from fuel would the best way to approach that issue, applied to all cars. Tax on fuel should remain as a carbon tax.

I read it initially as 'Electron Volt" and not "Electric Car" lol.

the biggest cost is just doing breaker swaps though which can become quite the mess with older homes. we worked on a house that was owned by an electrician and basically every switch in the house, every circuit and every outlet was just wrong in some unholy way, like flip a switch in the basement and you've started the garbage disposal up stairs.

You wouldn't do a breaker swap, its a dedicated circuit so you would pop in an 35 amp breaker into your panel (or sub panel if you dont have enough room) and you run the circuit on that. Like what youre you're saying has nothing to do with added the circuit in, because the new line needs to support 35amps, which nothing in the house (bar an good sized ac unit) is ran on. If you tried to put a super charger on an regular circuit that is 15 amps, it would trip the breaker immediately, or melt the wire since 15 amp wire cannot hold that kind of charge period.