uc_banana

>can cope with the kettle at half time of the fa cup final situation, and thus can cope with charging 30 million vehicles.

Not necessarily. At the scale of the national grid, a kettle is a very short-term load. I can't imagine that it would go well if 30 million homes decided to leave their ovens on all night.

Here in Europe, we will have to buy them because the alternatives will be banned.

>than having to buy oil from some of worst regimes on the planet

The current state of mineral and resource extraction and processing for EVs has a way to go before this argument holds water.

It turns out, the "open internet" is, in general, a terrible idea.

>additional spare capacity in the wires

1. What additional spare capacity? Why would any particular electrical installation (here, streetlights) be designed for about an order of magnitude more carrying capacity?

2. One of the original motivators for near-universal lighting of roads was to use the night-time baseload of power stations that could not be turned off (ie, nuclear and coal). Now that we use much more intermittent sources, this "free" energy just doesn't exist. It may be that switching to energy-efficient street lighting just makes up for this shortfall, leaving no spare power.

I nearly forgot the other fact about street-lighting. It was widely adopted at a time when there was a lot of night-time baseload that couldn't be turned off. Now that we use more intermittent sources, there just isn't this "free" night time power to be used.

Assuming you live on a motorway and your local streetlight used 500W, and was converted to an LED that draws practically nothing, that frees up....about enough juice to add 20 miles of range over 12 hours. No wonder no-one bothers with this scheme.

Once you've used the necessary amounts of up-to-date electronic design techniques and components to build the battery management, motor controller and charging systems in your "barebones" EV, adding some multicolour lighting and a touchscreen is a tiny step.

A milkfloat is nearest thing to a "barebones" EV.

For some definition of "simpler", sure. You could also look at it that an EV requires a functioning, efficient global system of engineering design, mineral extraction, and manufacture. There are very few countries that could claim they can make an EV 100% domestically, and the only one that comes to mind has been working very hard to put themselves in that position.

I don't see what's reasonable about asking a streetlight installation designed to handle at most several hundred watts to suddenly provide several kilowatts.

That's fine. Average Joe will live in a 15-minute city and find that all his needs are covered without a car!

Edit: I am being a little sarcastic, although I really like the idea of a 15-minute city and would happily live in one. I'm also priviledged to live in a country that largely developed before the car, and thus most cities are intrinsically capable of being 15-minute cities.

However, I say this to point out what is clearly true - there is no way for every citizen to own an EV. The "15-minute city" types of vision are how this will be addressed.

>Clearly my house can do that as my kettle is currently boiling and drawing 3kW alone.

Indeed. When people's kettle usage was much more synchronised (ie, when TV advert breaks were a shared experience by most people), they had to build a power station just to cover this scenario (Dinorwic pumped storage). "Power station" is also quite generous, as it is only storage, and therefore is a net loss to the power grid.

Even the most optimistic person has to admit that there's a limit to what can be done spread the additional load of 40 million EVs each needing to charge ~10kWh per day without grid upgrades and investment.