Robert’s LEAF diary – week 5: The LEAF meets an electric sup
Enviado: 25 ago 2011, 12:17
Robert’s LEAF diary – week 5: The LEAF meets an electric supercar and my roof gets a solar upgrade
"On Sunday I drove all of 15 miles down to the M5 motorway to the car park of a well-known service station eatery (a Happy one). I sat waiting for a while, until a bright blue Tesla Roadster slid silently beside me. Inside were two happy chaps, Zero Carbon World founder Kevin Sharpe and electric vehicle (EV) expert David Peilow.
By Robert Llewellyn on May 27, 2011 2:22 PM
For the last couple of years David has been busy installing an ultra low cost re-charging network the length of the UK, at the moment aimed at Tesla drivers but with a view to making it available to anyone with an EV.
They had just driven from John O’Groats in the far North of Scotland, stopping every 200 miles for a wee break while they re-charged (a full Tesla battery from flat takes less than three hours on a fast charger).
On the way down they charged six times, including at an overnight stop near Birmingham, and stopped to chat with me on day two before getting to Lands End by tea time.
It sounds a tad sedate but, as David said, he wouldn’t want to do it any faster in a conventional car; you have to stop for a break every now and then.
The main aim of their trip was to show that it was more than possible to do a 900 mile journey in a couple of days in an electric car that was designed to cover long distances.
The infrastructure is obviously an essential component in such an adventure, but they have managed to install it for very little money. All the hotels, restaurants and facilities that have installed the charging sockets don’t presently demand payment for the juice – it’s a free service they are laying on for their customers, like paper napkins or toilet facilities. The cost to a hotel to charge a Tesla would be around £3.50, for a Nissan LEAF, under £2 so it’s not a big ask.
David Peilow estimated that the total cost to drive the Tesla 900 miles was under £20.
Not that cost is the only issue. I’ve had a lot of criticism about where the electricity comes from – how is it generated, and is it really clean? It’s very important. Well, I have some news on that too.
Being a highly technical new-media sort of bloke, I can create all sorts of things in my studio-office. One of them is recording voice-overs, something I do quite regularly. Not today… there’s no chance; there’s so much clanging and crashing going on outside I can’t think.
The reason behind this cacophony is because the south facing roof of said studio-office (a one story extension on the back of my house) is the perfect location for a big slab of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, which are currently being installed. At no point during the day is it in shadow. We built the extension six years ago and I had no idea how useful it would be.
Five years ago I applied for, and eventually got planning permission to put up a wind turbine in my garden. This took three years. People from the local parish council planning committee stomped around my garden with me, mainly asking me why I wanted to bother. Wind turbines are an eyesore, they said. Wind turbines don’t work, they don’t produce any electricity, they said. All of which was nonsense.
However, by the time I got the permission, a) I was seriously broke and b) the company that was going to install it had gone bankrupt. It was only going to be a tiddly little thing that would just about light a pea bulb.
So now, with no need for planning permission, we’re having the solar PVs mounted on the roof and it’s so much easier.
For me, it’s an uphill battle to understand the complexities of electric cars – battery size, the number of kilowatt hours the batteries contain and how Newton Metres relate to horsepower. I’m getting there; I almost know what I’m talking about.
Now I’ve been thrown a curve ball when I need to not only know how solar panels work, but how much electricity they produce. I’ve been told that they will produce 2.52 kWp… suddenly I’ve got to deal with a whole new measurement! I know kWh – kilowatt hours – but not kWp. OMG, as Twitter would have it.
I now know this means ‘kilowatt-peak’, a measure of the peak output of a photovoltaic system. Put as simply as I can, it means that at the peak time of the day – early afternoon, summer, clear sky, strong sunlight – they will produce 2.25 kilowatts. I’ve also been told that on a clear sunny day between early May and late September, they will produce enough power to charge the Nissan LEAF battery from 0% to 100%, or 24 kilowatt hours worth of electricity.
Now you don’t need to be a know-all boffin, or even to receive funding from the petro-chemical industry to understand that days with weather like that are few and far between in the UK. However, the PV panels will produce electricity even on an overcast day. Nothing like as much, but it’s still something.
I’ve been talking to a neighbour who has already installed a large solar PV and water-heating array on the roof of an old pig shed. He’s good at maths – he’s an accountant. He’s got meters of spreadsheets and comparative energy usage charts. He’s had the panel installed for the last six months, and even in winter he was seeing a large reduction in his electricity bill. On a sunny day he’s producing so much he sells electricity back to the grid. He is, to put it mildly, a very chuffed accountant.
The power from my solar panels will run directly into the garage where I re-charge the LEAF. From there it goes through a meter which splits the power back either to the grid or to the new 32 amp charging pod I’m having fitted on the wall. This will charge the LEAF in around 4 hours, as opposed to 8 or 9 using the 13 amp domestic socket I’ve been using up until now.
It’s all very exciting, but now there’s some serious drilling going on outside my office. The sun’s gone in; there are clouds everywhere. Damn."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... grade.html
"On Sunday I drove all of 15 miles down to the M5 motorway to the car park of a well-known service station eatery (a Happy one). I sat waiting for a while, until a bright blue Tesla Roadster slid silently beside me. Inside were two happy chaps, Zero Carbon World founder Kevin Sharpe and electric vehicle (EV) expert David Peilow.
By Robert Llewellyn on May 27, 2011 2:22 PM
For the last couple of years David has been busy installing an ultra low cost re-charging network the length of the UK, at the moment aimed at Tesla drivers but with a view to making it available to anyone with an EV.
They had just driven from John O’Groats in the far North of Scotland, stopping every 200 miles for a wee break while they re-charged (a full Tesla battery from flat takes less than three hours on a fast charger).
On the way down they charged six times, including at an overnight stop near Birmingham, and stopped to chat with me on day two before getting to Lands End by tea time.
It sounds a tad sedate but, as David said, he wouldn’t want to do it any faster in a conventional car; you have to stop for a break every now and then.
The main aim of their trip was to show that it was more than possible to do a 900 mile journey in a couple of days in an electric car that was designed to cover long distances.
The infrastructure is obviously an essential component in such an adventure, but they have managed to install it for very little money. All the hotels, restaurants and facilities that have installed the charging sockets don’t presently demand payment for the juice – it’s a free service they are laying on for their customers, like paper napkins or toilet facilities. The cost to a hotel to charge a Tesla would be around £3.50, for a Nissan LEAF, under £2 so it’s not a big ask.
David Peilow estimated that the total cost to drive the Tesla 900 miles was under £20.
Not that cost is the only issue. I’ve had a lot of criticism about where the electricity comes from – how is it generated, and is it really clean? It’s very important. Well, I have some news on that too.
Being a highly technical new-media sort of bloke, I can create all sorts of things in my studio-office. One of them is recording voice-overs, something I do quite regularly. Not today… there’s no chance; there’s so much clanging and crashing going on outside I can’t think.
The reason behind this cacophony is because the south facing roof of said studio-office (a one story extension on the back of my house) is the perfect location for a big slab of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, which are currently being installed. At no point during the day is it in shadow. We built the extension six years ago and I had no idea how useful it would be.
Five years ago I applied for, and eventually got planning permission to put up a wind turbine in my garden. This took three years. People from the local parish council planning committee stomped around my garden with me, mainly asking me why I wanted to bother. Wind turbines are an eyesore, they said. Wind turbines don’t work, they don’t produce any electricity, they said. All of which was nonsense.
However, by the time I got the permission, a) I was seriously broke and b) the company that was going to install it had gone bankrupt. It was only going to be a tiddly little thing that would just about light a pea bulb.
So now, with no need for planning permission, we’re having the solar PVs mounted on the roof and it’s so much easier.
For me, it’s an uphill battle to understand the complexities of electric cars – battery size, the number of kilowatt hours the batteries contain and how Newton Metres relate to horsepower. I’m getting there; I almost know what I’m talking about.
Now I’ve been thrown a curve ball when I need to not only know how solar panels work, but how much electricity they produce. I’ve been told that they will produce 2.52 kWp… suddenly I’ve got to deal with a whole new measurement! I know kWh – kilowatt hours – but not kWp. OMG, as Twitter would have it.
I now know this means ‘kilowatt-peak’, a measure of the peak output of a photovoltaic system. Put as simply as I can, it means that at the peak time of the day – early afternoon, summer, clear sky, strong sunlight – they will produce 2.25 kilowatts. I’ve also been told that on a clear sunny day between early May and late September, they will produce enough power to charge the Nissan LEAF battery from 0% to 100%, or 24 kilowatt hours worth of electricity.
Now you don’t need to be a know-all boffin, or even to receive funding from the petro-chemical industry to understand that days with weather like that are few and far between in the UK. However, the PV panels will produce electricity even on an overcast day. Nothing like as much, but it’s still something.
I’ve been talking to a neighbour who has already installed a large solar PV and water-heating array on the roof of an old pig shed. He’s good at maths – he’s an accountant. He’s got meters of spreadsheets and comparative energy usage charts. He’s had the panel installed for the last six months, and even in winter he was seeing a large reduction in his electricity bill. On a sunny day he’s producing so much he sells electricity back to the grid. He is, to put it mildly, a very chuffed accountant.
The power from my solar panels will run directly into the garage where I re-charge the LEAF. From there it goes through a meter which splits the power back either to the grid or to the new 32 amp charging pod I’m having fitted on the wall. This will charge the LEAF in around 4 hours, as opposed to 8 or 9 using the 13 amp domestic socket I’ve been using up until now.
It’s all very exciting, but now there’s some serious drilling going on outside my office. The sun’s gone in; there are clouds everywhere. Damn."
Em: http://www.thechargingpoint.com/opinion ... grade.html