The "grid overload" story is fossil fuel industry propaganda, I'm afraid. You can find the details here: https://www.virta.global/blog/myth-buster-electric-vehicles-...

...but the salient point is that if 80% of all passenger cars become electric, this would lead to a total increase of 10-15% in electricity consumption. (Far, far from the "order of magnitude" claim.)

And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.

We can also work back from first principles here. According to [0] we can see in 2019 the UK consumed 20.8bn litres of diesel and 16.2bn litres of petrol for non-commercial use. Taking the energy consumption of 10 KWh and 8.9 KWh of a litre of diesel and petrol respectively gives us an annual total of 3.4x10^11 KWh.

Dividing this number by 8760 (the number of hours in 2019) gives us 40,203,196 KW, or 40 GW total energy consumption. Assuming that electric vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE, gives us about 8GW of electricity needed to replace all petrol and diesel consumption in the UK.

According to [1] the UK's peak consumption is currently 61.9 GW with a theoretical maximum of 75.3 GW. So to replace all non-commercial fuel used would be 13% of the peak usage.

According to [2] the UK's total electricity generation in 2019 was 323.7 TWh which is 3.237x10^11 KWh which is roughly equivalent to the total energy value for non-commercial diesel and petrol calculated above. Assuming again the 5x efficiency gain that would mean a ~20% increase in the amount of energy that would need to be generated.

[0] https://www.ukpra.co.uk/en/about/facts-and-figures

[1] https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/76160/13537-elec...

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> And even this ignores the vehicle-to-grid features of modern EVs, which can actually put power back into the grid during periods of high demand.

I expect this is the part which will require more investment than anything else, as it will mean electrifying office car parks — the UK is further north than every American state except Alaska, so winter sunsets happen before the work day ends.

It certainly shouldn’t be impossible, but the current UK government is prone to acting as if they can make things happen just by saying so rather than spending money or doing any planning.

It isn't in the UK. There is very little surplus capacity in our grid. We started moving away from coal and subsidising green power years ago, and there has been chronic underinvestment in some areas as a result. A few years ago, it was a massive issue, things have improved (particularly now with falling demand) but it is a legitimate concern in some cases. Also, remember that the UK will need wind, solar doesn't work, and it isn't windy all the time (despite parts of our country being relatively windy).

You seem to be confusing generation capacity with grid capacity. Generation capacity might be a problem, but it's solvable with relatively simple solutions. (Build more power plants, buy in power from Europe.)

The grid capacity is fine, however.

No, I am not. The underinvestment extends to the grid (the UK has trouble replacing power lines/maintenance, let alone moving towards adding new capacity...the UK has very few detached houses so this is going to be complex).

And "build more power plants"...so simple...part of the problem is that actually building more power plants is more complex than just typing a post out or observing it should be true. This is linked to the issues that I mentioned in the previous post (when the govt moved towards green power a decade or so ago, investment went through the floor...more recently, they have introduced price caps...the reason why the UK hasn't built power plants is because the govt asked companies to build them, and they said no...which is why the govt has had to hand out big subsidies to nuclear).

Btw, if you aren't familiar with something, ask more questions (I know this because I used to work as an analyst, and part of my coverage was these companies) rather than assume that someone has made a basic mistake. The power market is local, not global. What is happening in the US isn't happening everywhere else (the UK is far further down this road than anyone else).

Ok well all I know is that over here, in The Netherlands, it’s the companies that maintain the actual grids that are saying this. Our grids are already fairly heavily loaded, and it needs upgrades to accommodate the increase in demand. Both from EVs as with other projects to migrate away from fossil fuels.

See for example a study from our government about this exact subject (in Dutch): https://www.kimnet.nl/binaries/kimnet/documenten/rapporten/2...

The summary is that if there were 4 million vehicles charging overnight, it would cause a total of 20GW of electricity. Our current total consumption (including industry) is 33GW, so this would cause a significant increase in electricity consumption.

I don't know the precise UK numbers, but a complete switch to electric cars would mean 20% more electricity consumed from the grid. This is not a huge increase, in most places the grid should be completely fine to sustain the extra load. Especially, as car charging is wonderful for grid balancing, you mostly wouldn't do it in the moments of highest grid demand. Yes, residential electricity consumption would about double, but that isn't a huge challenge for the grids either. The biggest change would be adding some more transformers which provide the 230V to households. But as the changeover to electric cars will take like 20 years, this is absolutely doable - and in Germany the electric providers started already the planning.

> Most electrical grids will need to be upgraded to accommodate this.

I'm not so sure. Using the province of Ontario, since I have the link handy:

* http://www.ieso.ca/power-data

The demand the last few days peaked at 18:00 (local/ET) at 16.5-17K (MW), while its lowest point is at 02:00 at about 11.5K.

Would overnight car charging really exceed the ~5500 MW of power that needs to be handled already?