Electric Car Charge Posts To Be Installed In Every New Home In England (cleantechnica.com) 185
England is introducing a mandatory electric car charging point for each newly built home. "This means that every brand new home, by law, will have to have a charging port for your electric vehicle -- even if you don't yet own one," reports CleanTechnica. From the report: This would make it easier on both fully electric and plug-in hybrid owners in England who use the government's home charger subsidy, which has funded the installation of almost 100,000 wall boxes, as home chargers are commonly called. In the Forward written by the Secretary of Transport, Rt Hon. Chris Grayling, he states that in the previous year the government set out a "bold and integrated Industrial Strategy" that was designed to create a "high-growth, high productivity green economy across the UK."
It would be an economy ready for the 21st century and a huge part of this is a plan for solving the problem of roadside nitrogen dioxide concentrations. The goal is to cut exposure to air pollutants, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve the UK's energy security. One of these polices states that they will support the development of one of the best electric vehicle infrastructure networks in the world.
It would be an economy ready for the 21st century and a huge part of this is a plan for solving the problem of roadside nitrogen dioxide concentrations. The goal is to cut exposure to air pollutants, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve the UK's energy security. One of these polices states that they will support the development of one of the best electric vehicle infrastructure networks in the world.
Wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
And.. (Score:3)
How would their electrical distribution system hold up if these people were to actually use them - you know, all arriving home in the evening at about peak residential usage time, and plugging their cars in?
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Its about the same draw as an AC unit or a dryer...so it'll hold up about the same as a summer night.
This might be concurrent with the AC or dryer usage etc., although timer controls could be used. I knew someone who lived way out in the country using an old generator, and had a similar dilemma: If the dryer is running, you can't vacuum, or cook a roast! As their finances improved, they resolved their little problem.
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Almost all residential units in the UK are single phase. The few that are not will be in converted industrial or commercial units. Although, in fact, many small commercial and industrial units are also single phase.
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Its about the same draw as an AC unit or a dryer...so it'll hold up about the same as a summer night.
No, it's not the same. The same means it is the same. This is more. Right now people use their AC and dryers at the same time. Now we are talking about adding another power hungry appliance, possibly during peak usage. I'm not taking sides here. But I will point out incorrect statements.
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This is England. Few homes have AC.
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British automotive electrical systems? Lucas?? (Score:2)
How would their electrical distribution system hold up if these people were to actually use them - you know, all arriving home in the evening at about peak residential usage time, and plugging their cars in?
Oh, man. It's the same problem *everywhere* where electric cars are being pushed. Where is the electricity coming from in the first place? How will the grid handle it - especially at peak demand hours? Where is the cobalt and the lithium in the batteries coming from? So yeah, no tailpipe emissions, out of sight and out of mind.
Okay, so, if 90% of those charging stations never get used, what's the environmental impact of making - and hard-wiring the copper! - for all those boxes?
This is a bold strategy on th
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This is about long term planning. It's way way cheaper to fit the charge points as the home is being built that retrofitting afterwards. As some point every home is going to need one (at least if they have a vehicle). So lets mandate them now.
I would also add that in England 75% of all homes where build before 1980. About 20% are over 100 years old. These house are likely going to be around for a *long* time, so getting it right now matters. I would imagine that this is wildly different from say the USA whe
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Sensible UK residents with electric cars are on Economy 7 tariffs or better, so they tell their cars not to charge until after 10pm. Unless the battery is close to empty, but only a small fraction of cars will run their batteries close to empty on any given day.
... and "demand-response" (Score:3)
What the driver wants is something like "130 miles of range in the battery by 7am)", so...
The plan is that home EV charging will ramp down or switch off when there is high demand on the grid ("demand-response") either nationally or locally, and ramp up when there is an excess of electricity supply.
The incentive for this is real-time pricing - you can already do this in the UK using energy retailers like "Octopus Energy" with the slightly cringily named "Agile Octopus" contract.
Octopus will charge you up to
Re: And.. (Score:2)
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Re:Wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
Any project with Chris Grayling attached to it is usually doomed to failure and/or cost a fortune.
For those who don't know much about Chris Grayling: When Boris Johnson grabbed power as Prime Minister, he fired many ministers: Most of them for not being yes-men, but one of them for incompetence, and that was Chris Grayling.
Chris Grayling was the one who awarded a multi-million contract to deliver additional ferry services to a company that doesn't have any ferries and is completely incapable of doing the job. And then P&O Ferries, who has been in the ferry business for 180 years, read about it in the newspaper, was wondering why they had never heard of this new ferry service, figured out that the contract had been awarded without any bidding process, sued the government and won £33 million.
And this particular mishap, which I find hard to explain with stupidity alone, was one of his minor mistakes. Total damage through his incompetence is estimated over 2.5 billion British pound.
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Which uncle/cousin/brother in law of a politician owns the company that sells those charging ports...
I'm not sure, but really there's no reason to install a full charging station in each new home. It's sufficient to simply require that a 50A 220V outlet be installed... an ordinary NEMA 14-50 receptacle [amazon.com] ($10) in the garage, or if there's no garage one in an outdoor enclosure [amazon.com] ($37). The total cost for installing such a thing during construction shouldn't be more than $150, including the receptacle, the 6-gauge wire, the 50A circuit breaker and labor (the work is very easy when the walls are open).
If you
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How is it a good cause to manufacture, ship, install and eventually scrap expensive power electronics that in 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% cases will never be used once in their expected lifetime? Talk about waste of resources.
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In the UK, the home EV charge point provides 230V AC (actually it is 240V AC if you put a multimeter on it) to provide a power of about 7kW to charge the car. The charger is in the car and not on the wall. You connect a cable from the EV charge point to the car. If in the next 20 years the socket specification changes then either replace the socket on the wall or change the charging cable or use an adaptor.
It is not a problem.
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Why do they need this? (Score:2)
It's hilarious because in the US we have silly hot button issues like abortion and bathroom rights. In Europe, they distract their citizen with environmental non-issues while their pensions and healthcare systems get bankrupted.
Unlike the US, regular ports in the UK are 220v which should be adequate for charging. No need for special anything.
Just seems like special interest graft.
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While you can .... this isn't really a good idea. You want to be able to pull 6-7kW or more. A standard 13A/240V outlet isn't really meant to deliver this amount of power for long periods.
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Environmental issues are about the only issues that actually count. Unless your one of these weird "scientists are in a vast left wing conspiracy to lie about physics" people.
Yeah this mandate is a bit odd. But its also a step in the right direction.
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Our car has a 13A socket charger, which is fine, but it did make the socket get a bit warm sometimes when I used it. We've got a 16A circuit to a proper charge point, and apart from needing switching off and on occasionally, it is far better behaved. It also means we're not leaving the (expensive) charger out to be stolen (we have a chain on the cable).
However... there are lots of things wrong here. The first is, if you by an EV or plug-in hybrid, you can get a charge point "for free". The government will p
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To be fair, most UK power is actually 240V (nominally 230, but 240 is within the allowed variance).
Of course, the typical US car charging circuit if not using a 120V 20A socket is 240V at 40 or 60 amps.
I charge my car at home at 16A on a 120V 20A circuit with a dedicated breaker. It's... slow. I got an email from the utility board this month offering a $400 credit if I put in a 240V charge point. I may well take them up on it.
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UK homes typically also have a 15A or higher circuit for cooking or heating...
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32A commando connector = 7KW.
More than enough, and present on every building site in the country.
Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Far cheaper to put in while building a new home than to retrofit later, and the additional cost compared to the house build will be sod all.
At least the circuitry to the charging point. - that's one extra circuit breaker and a solid piece of cable. If they're just mandating it should be EV charger ready it's not a big deal. If they're mandating an actual charging box be attached to that wire it's fairly expensive and wasteful, different companies have different chargers and standards/features change so you can probably get a better box when you actually need one. Of course it's not expensive compared to buying a whole home but it all adds up.
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Don't underestimate what effect 'required by law' has on normal market prices.
Good luck with that (Score:2)
The vast majority of new affordable homes in the UK do not have offstreet parking, or even allocated parking - you have to go more expensive for that - and yet the decree makes no mention or allowances for these properties.
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Chargers (strictly speaking EVSEs, not chargers) built into the sidewalks? It's not that hard.
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Building out chargers like this is no different to how street lights are installed in new developments. Why would EVSEs be any different?
Evidently, you don't understand how housing is developed in the UK.
Typically, the developer builds new roads, sidewalks, etc. as part of the development.
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The phrase "every brand new home" is clickbait.
I can't easily find actual, real world, contact details for "cleantechnica.com" which would be a minimum criterion for credibility in my book. The article to which they ultimately link says no such thing.
Where is this electricity coming from? (Score:3)
I wonder how they plan to provide the electricity for all these new electric cars, don't you?
Look what I found:
https://www.heraldscotland.com... [heraldscotland.com]
So, the UK is drilling for more natural gas. And the article is all about how this natural gas drilling is going to reduce their CO2 output. Maybe instead of, or in addition to, these electrical outlets they put a natural gas line to the garage. That way they can cut out the middleman of having to run the generators with the natural gas to charge up these electric cars and just run the cars on natural gas.
Or maybe they can invest in an energy source that is reliable, inexpensive, takes little land area, is plentiful, safe, and low in CO2. They can claim that they will be doing carbon capture and sequestration in the future but as that article points out they don't have much of a plan for that right now.
I'm pretty sure the UK knows what the solution is to this problem, they just aren't ready to admit it to themselves just yet.
Re:Where is this electricity coming from? (Score:4, Interesting)
Gas power plant --> transmission --> charge electric car --> move electric car is significantly more efficient than the car burning any type of fuel. That is not counting any regenerative power gains under braking which are standard in consumer electric vehicles.
Also I assume you are trying to intimate a nuclear power station, in which case perhaps you want to look at the Hinkley Point power station which is a nuclear plant currently under construction.
Re:Where is this electricity coming from? (Score:4, Insightful)
I assume you are trying to intimate a nuclear power station
I am. That's because there's a lot of people that believe the UK will not meet their CO2 emission reduction goals without more nuclear power.
https://uk.reuters.com/article... [reuters.com]
Britainâ(TM)s climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), said Britain would need to ramp up its renewable electricity generation such as wind and solar to meet the net zero target.
But the CCC also said it was likely that renewables would need to be complemented by low-carbon power options such as nuclear power and carbon capture and storage at gas or biomass power plants.
in which case perhaps you want to look at the Hinkley Point power station which is a nuclear plant currently under construction.
I took a look at it, and it will not be enough as pointed out by the article I linked to.
All but one of Britainâ(TM)s current nuclear fleet, which provide around 20 percent of the countryâ(TM)s electricity, are due to close by 2030.
Estimates are that the UK will need at least 30 GW of nuclear power to reach their CO2 emissions goal in 2050. Hinkley Point C is 3 GW. The UK will need 10 more of these in the next 30 years.
Electric cars are a good idea to meet this goal, but only if that doesn't mean building many more natural gas power stations to charge them. Electric cars are nice for a commuter vehicle but no battery will power the big trucks that need lots of power over long distances. For those a switch to natural gas would certainly help in their CO2 emission goal.
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Re: Where is this electricity coming from? (Score:2)
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EV-Big rigs are a thing and they are going to revolutionize the industry. The Tractors themselves do
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No Room (Score:5, Insightful)
And just exactly WHERE are people going to park their cars to charge them ? If you want a new house in the UK with enough space to park your car it will cost you lots of coins - it's not like the US where many houses have driveways. If it's a block of apartments they will have communal parking.
Developers are notorious for cramming as many small houses as possible into a development with garages too small for cars and other crap.
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And just exactly WHERE are people going to park their cars to charge them ? If you want a new house in the UK with enough space to park your car it will cost you lots of coins - it's not like the US where many houses have driveways. If it's a block of apartments they will have communal parking.
The communal parking must have EV chargers at every parking stall, obviously, with some mechanism for billing the electricity cost to the right person.
Developers are notorious for cramming as many small houses as possible into a development with garages too small for cars and other crap.
This should addressed by building codes.
It's about time (Score:2, Insightful)
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You seriously believe that you're the only person to consider the impact of EV uptake on the National Grid and EV update will be a surprise to them?
TW's of additional electricity, LOL! Did you learn a new word and want to use it?
Try an additional 20MW with intelligent charging. That’s the equivalent output a reasonably sized offshore wind farm.
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How Are You Generating That Electricity... (Score:2)
Better be generating that electricity by solar or wind ONLY or you didn't fix anything. Did you check to see if the electric grid can support all those vehicles charging? You do know the electric vehicle lie right? .... you know...you know...producing batteries and disposing of batteries is extremely harmful on the environment, in many ways worse than fossil fuels. You do realize, they use fossil fuel burning portable generators to re-charge your dead batteries on the highway to get you home is just adding
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Solution: Solar produced hydrogen to replace fossil fuel in fossil fuel burning vehicles. Wake up people!!!
That is a very bad idea.
First, solar is shit for energy return on investment. Second, the conversion to hydrogen adds more to the loss. Then there is the losses on getting the energy back out. By the time this is done everyone would have been better off by leaving the solar part out of it and use whatever energy source you had to produce the solar collectors to make the hydrogen. For much of the UK this means natural gas. Which in that case you should probably just use natural gas for fuel in the vehic
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Well Spain is twice as good for solar as the UK. Might be negative in the UK, but actually, its not. (Google is your friend).
Wind power is vastly better investment in the UK than any other kind of energy. Projections say we could produce double our needs - and avoid having to buy gas from the Russian Mafia as a side effect (does that explain the Internet propaganda?).
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My 2Kw high efficiency solar system produces all the power needed to run my house, sadly the feed in fate is only 1/3 of the buy in rate, so I still pay a little.
Cost was $4K, and payback will be less than 5 years.
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Batteries are being recycled and more recycling capabilities are being added. We should be able to get it to the same level as lead-acid batteries.
The vast majority of people have a commute within electric car range so there's no need for portable generators.
Stupid move (Score:2)
This is really a stupid move.
First, which charger model will you put? Because, sadly, electric cars don't have all the same plug type.
Also, what does this provide if you decide to get a much more efficient and cleaner fuel cell vehicle instead?
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Put in a 32A commando (building site) connector. Industry standard, every electric car has an adaptor for them, you can just use caravan adaptors like caravans do.
Now you also have a generic power point for mowing the lawn, powering a pressure washer etc. just one cheap adaptor away.
I think it's a stupid idea, just from a peak-load point of view, but your concerns are really the most minor I can think of.
P.S. My last house, I installed a 32A 220V commando connector deliberately. I used it to mow the lawn,
a standard one? (Score:2)
There is a standard, yes?
so much wrong (Score:3)
This is not needed. What is needed is a wire run to a box in all new construction. Not a charger. For those who need a dedicated charger they can install one, but there is no excuse for an EV to not be able to charge from an outlet with just an adapter. If they can regen, they already have most of the necessary hardware onboard.
Yeah (Score:2)
And Boris will deliver Brexit do or die.
So far he lost 100% of all the votes.
This is just pure stupidity to lure voters.
Sigh. (Score:2)
Tell me when they all come with car parking spaces first, and then I'll believe it.
And only being in new builds means that they will be incredibly minor - UK builders have nearly stopped construction, and it's been that way for decades. Nobody's paying to build new homes, and what they are building a tiny one-bed studios with no facilities and plasterboard walls.
Honestly, I've owned a 1930's house, a 1960's house and lived in 70's apartments - because there you actually stand a chance of being able to walk
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But
This is a building regulation (Score:2)
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They'll just have to cough up the money up front
Meh. You're talking about adding maybe $150 to the cost of a $100K+ home (and that's very, very cheap for a new home), assuming the requirement is simply to add a 50A outlet in the garage or carport, or by the driveway. $500 if the requirement is for a full charging station.
regardless of whether they're ever going to have an electric car or not.
You mean "regardless of whether going to have a car in 30 years". In 20 years, maybe less, all new cars will be electric and fossil fuel-powered vehicles will be rare, and possibly on their way from being banned, except with special pe
L2 charger is under $200 on Amazon (Score:2)
And a 220v outlet is, what, about $200 installed. They make it sound like this is some massive cost to a new house.
Is this worth putting people in jail? (Score:2)
You make a law when something so bad, so egregious is happening, that society deems force to be necessary to enforce it.
Is THIS one of those hills to die on? Laws aren't for good ideas. Is the government of the UK ready to put people in jail over... installing an outlet?
What the heck?
Further increasing the cost of living for everyone (Score:2)
Mandate a ton of different regulations for building the smallest of human dwellings.
Wonder why so many people are homeless, with too few, too expensive apartments everywhere.
Politicians creating a crisis they can use to get reelected later on. Today, we're "solving climate change", next decade we're going to "care for all the homeless" (we just created).
More dumb mandates from the Mary Poppins state (Score:3)
Much like the California bullet train the government is mandating technology that will be obsolete before it is even fully implemented.
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The posts can have a pinpad on them. This prevents juice theft.
As for curb parking they are already investing in chargers that pop up from the ground and have contactless payment systems.
As for system type it probably doesn't matter as they all have converted plugs between type 1 and type 2. The biggest factor is having the electrical circuit wired in and a suitable plug type. The additional cost at build would be tiny, sparky is already on site, there is no skin on the building, so it's literally 1 extr
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If the house, has a garage the point would be inside not too mention, people will probably notice a strange vehicle sitting in their carport for hours at a time, charging up. Technically speaking, an external water resistant power point on a separate 15 amp circuit is probably all that would be legislated and you can use it for when ever you want to use electricity outside and then you can plug your cars charger into it. So not that big an ask and quite useful even when not charging a car.
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Garages are often too narrow to practically contain a car (ie you can drive in, but then you cant open the door and have to climb out the sunroof).
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Garages are often too narrow to practically contain a car (ie you can drive in, but then you cant open the door and have to climb out the sunroof).
With even semi-autonomous cars, you could get out of the car in the driveway, let the car park itself. Should be no more difficult than automatic parallel parking.
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My garage is too narrow to contain my present car. (It is also full of junk.) However, it would not be difficult to run a 8-yard length of cable from the meter at the back of the garage to a socket on the wall at the front, so that I can charge a car sitting on the hardstanding.
In fact, I am already thinking of doing this. Charging sockets in the UK seem to be one of two standards, and there are converter cables so it should not be difficult.
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Why would you install anything compatible with GM? GM has pulled out of Europe (except for some niche vehicles).
Level 2 charging (which this will be) is standardized within continents. I think that means a Mennekes connector in the UK.
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yep, the standard in the EU going forward is CCS with a little Chadamo
Obviously the UK can't use that standard then.
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Well they'll probably go for J1772, which all EV's support.
Makes the most sense, since most people charging at home will do so overnight so won't need the fast charging offered by the other connectors.
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Once you have suitable electricity service to a location that is convenient for charging a car, you could replace or augment a standard charging station with a proprietary one if you prefer.
As for security, there's lots of ways to do that, starting with a simple physical lock and all the way up to the vehicle and charge station doing some kind of mutual authentication. I believe the data link layer stuff is included in the PEV charging standards.
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Let the free market find the price and the people who want to pay for the service.
Yup. I'm all for saving the environment, but it rubs me the wrong way when my tax dollars go towards subsidizing an electric car for someone who could've afforded it otherwise. That tax money you're taking from me represents how I now have to try to keep my 9-year-old gas guzzling piece of crap on the road that much longer, because I have even less money now to put towards something slightly better. And something slightly better never means a used EV which needs an insanely expensive battery replacement
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Actually, once electric adoption hits 20% (perhaps as low as 10% but not more than 30%), I believe that the oil industry will start crashing. First the price at the pump will tumble because removing 20% of the demand will cause such. Next the big drillers will start to have problems getting funding for their projects, Then the local gas stations will start to disappear because who would want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to change out the storage tanks (which need to be done every 20 years or so)
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I'm guessing that's between five to twenty years before your 'personal standard of living' will require an electric car.
Assuming self-driving taxis don't replace personal car ownership.
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Re:Charger subsidy? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yup. I'm all for saving the environment, but it rubs me the wrong way when my tax dollars go towards subsidizing an electric car
Your tax dollars are already subsidising the oil industry. Is that any better?
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Yes. I directly and indirectly use the oil industry every day, and so does everyone who manufacturers and ships the stuff I need and want.
Re: Charger subsidy? (Score:2)
Stop worrying, the Tory gov has spent the last few years systematically dismantling subsidies for green energy, provoking a near total collapse in domestic installs of solar along the way and close to killing onshore wind. Your taxes won't be subsidising anything but Tory wallets. And overpriced Chinese nuclear.
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Why not let a generation of people select their own transport.
VAT, equal road tax, a tax on power for a home that owns an electric car/van/truck/SUV?
Bring in some tax money like with a road tax/diesel/gasoline tax.
Why should an electric car not pay a much back to a gov as any other "car"?
Then let people shop around.
They can buy a home. Then put in with the needed "extra" electricity for car/s.
Why s
Re:Charger subsidy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because individual economic actors don't need to take externalities into account. The costs of externalities need to be imposed on people otherwise they will ignore them. That's the limitation of the free market. And it's why we have licensing and rules.
It would be cheaper - in the free market - to buy a car with zero filtering on your emissions - a really dirty engine. We'd probably still be putting lead in the gasoline in a truly free market world. Because the net cost to *yourself* of having lead emissions in your own car is negligible - most of the costs are born by other people. However, you're also sucking in all the lead emissions from everyone else.
So, say it costs you $1000 to remove lead from your gasoline, and you benefit by saving health costs of $1 (due to not sucking down your own emissions). It's not worth switching to the cleaner fuel yourself, based on the Free Market. But, say everyone is sucking down lead emissions from on average 2000 other people, then 2000 other people save that $1 in health costs when you as an individual switch to unleaded. But in the "Free Market" you wouldn't bother since you don't give a shit about saving other people $1 at the cost of your $1000. However, If everyone switches to unleaded we saves $2000 each due to all not sucking down each others emissions, and the cost is $1000 each. But still, if you as an individual can not switch, you benefit economically from not switching. This is "The Tragedy of the Commons". And it's why you need a government or someone to force people to switch. Because you always individually benefit from cheating, even though each cheater costs the community more than they save.
This is why the "leave it to the Free Market" argument fails whenever there are externalities (costs born by strangers because of what we choose). Externalities are why government regulation exists, and why this individualist free market rallying call shit makes no actual economic sense.
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To boil this down, activities that you do can have positive or negative utility. And they can have this for yourself, or others.
People are fine being left to their own to choose activities that have positive utility for *themselves*, but those activities can have negative utility for other people. Still if the total negative utility is less than the positive utility that you as an individual gain, then everyone can freely do that activity, and overall, net utility of the society increases because of that ac
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The costs of externalities need to be imposed on people otherwise they will ignore them.
The costs of these externalities are impossible to determine and any effort to internalize them by the force of government can simply be voted away in any democracy. The costs of the externalities would have to be compared to some alternative. In the early days of petroleum use the cost of its use was the risk of fires, breathing problems, and perhaps other issues. The cost of not using the fuel oil or kerosene was freezing to death. The external costs was negative.
The reason these costs are called "ext
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Because individual economic actors don't need to take externalities into account. The costs of externalities need to be imposed on people otherwise they will ignore them. That's the limitation of the free market. And it's why we have licensing and rules.
I don't disagree, but there are some pretty big nuances on both sides. Yes, I buy a widget and it causes pollution which affects someone else far away, in time and space. Or, I buy some food, and someone far away is profiting from the food being bad for my health. So yes, we have these big disconnects, in the network, and so an organisation which can see the network as a whole, has to step in and say, this over here is causing harm over there, so we need to fix this.
But they are not really "externalities",
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"VAT, equal road tax, a tax on power for a home that owns an electric car/van/truck/SUV?" - that will come when EVs are the norm.
"Bring in some tax money like with a road tax/diesel/gasoline tax." - see above
"Why should an electric car not pay a much back to a gov as any other "car"?" - if they are buying electricity to charge then
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Re: Charger subsidy? (Score:2)
The "free" market is an utter failure.
"Non-free" markets are also failures - examples can be provided to "back up" either stupid, fucking generalization.