Electric car pulling a caravan

Interestingly, we were at a party at our neighbour's, yesterday and three of the people there all work for a major energy company who have massive gas storage facilities in this area.  They were saying that EV's are a short-term stop-gap and that the infrastructure for widespread use will never be possible.  They are starting to invest in hydrogen production and are waiting for the government to get on board at which point they were saying that there will be an industry-wide move in that direction. Interesting times and I have a feeling that this is what will happen.

I understand that Hydrogen is very expensive to produce and requires,very high pressure. vessels,for it to be stored in enough quantities to make it a viable alternative? 

Don't know about that JV - but these guys are fairly senior in the company and seemed very positive about the direction in which things would go to the extent that they are in the process of converting an existing BP gas site to hydrogen manufacture.

They didn't go into detail but they also said that they vent enough gas off on a daily basis from their existing storage facilities to run thousands of homes for a year!

It makes way more sense looking at the bigger picture, the building of EV plug ins has never really moved at a pace. I’m thinking they(both) may be the new Petrol & Diesels going forward into the future.

For Manchester, the business park I went to had a pair of 22kW AC chargers. I plugged in there at 26% and was at 87% five hours later when I left. Zero waiting.

Maybe no wait for you, but the chap behind who wanted to use that charger had to wait five hours!

I thought one of the problems the U.K. had was it didn’t have massive gas storage facilities.  

Onto Hydrogen.   It takes far more energy overall to move a vehicle 1 mile with Hydrogen than it does with Battery electric.  Look it up.   Maybe for heavy transport hydrogen has a future. But for personal transport it doesn’t have a future.  

However touting Hydrogen is classic merchant of doubt territory.  You don’t need to do anything now because a new technology is just around the  corner which will save us.  Just like the cigarette industry were going to introduce safe tobacco in the 70’s, so there was no need to give up smoking.    

Navigateur, there are two distinct chargers types for car charging. Rapid, where you are expected to charge your vehicle quickly and move in as soon as you are ready. These often have time limits and overstay charges if you are longer than is reasonable. The other is a destination charger. These are much lower power, and lower cost. They are designed to charge you while you go and do something else, for hours or even all day. The entire point of them is to charge slowly for a long period of time, and you don’t use them if you are in any sort of rush. Waiting for a destination charger is like waiting for a space in a long stay carpark. 

Having said that, I display a clock on my dashboard with  my estimates return time, and a link to an app that will actively alert me if someone needs to charge and chooses to contact me. No one did.

I think we are doing quite well in the UK producing renewable energy and at present this points to us being able to support electric car charging. We are short of public chargers and this is where we are lacking. Hydrogen has always been a consideration but it's known to be more expensive than electricity and similar to fossil fuel costs. We should be able to produce cheap electricity which will benefit all in the future. 

My point is still that the charger, whether fast or slow, is not available for long periods of time while in use.  So those following who had planned to use it can't, and have to have a Plan B to go on somewhere else, with hopefully enough range for a third stop should the Plan B equipment also be in use.

There would have to be considerably more chargers in the country than there are individual fuel pumps at present to give a reasonable certainty to be abe to charge when needed.

You can check if a charger is in use via an app before heading for it, Nav. It’s not as bad as you seem to think.