grendel

not according to the maib statement in the EDP

currently as we build new developments we do include provisions for charging, nobody is currently even looking at upgrading existing networks to make provision for EV charging, there is enough work getting supplies to new developments, if a boat mooring were part of a new development, then electric posts are being included, but on the ones i have seen to date these have been your standard electric posts, and the only upgrade has been from no electric posts to a handful of electric posts

In central London we are already having to install primary (33,000V ) substations to new developments, and running several (up to 6.5 at the moment) kilometers of 33,000V cables from the outskirts of london into the centre to get enough capacity to supply the new developments- without allowing extra capacity for EV charging, I could name 5 of our central london projects that exceed 5KM of cable to supply them.

its all very well discussing electric vehicles, but currently this country cannot support them with charging facilities, a few places may have the spare electrical capacity to charge some, but in general this countries infrastructure is not currently capable. every substation would have to be upgraded to at least 3x its current capacity, every power station or generation plant would need to triple its output, and every single cable in the country would need to be upgraded to carry 3x its current capacity. this is a massive undertaking and basically would mean totally rebuilding the existing supply network, the cash is just not there to do this- especially after the current economic crisis of covid, it would take a massive government funded programme to even start the upgrades, and the timescale to complete would be in decades, no individual utility company has the resources to do this currently. I work for a utility provider and currently when we connect a new site there are EV charging spaces allocated to the site, maybe just 2 or 4, for a whole new estate. nowhere near enough for every property to own an electric vehicle and charge it. the main issue is that you can apply diversity for a property, ie a house with gas central heating has a maximum capacity of 100A (ie 24 kW) but because you can average out the consumption of lots of houses some using electricity at one time, others using it at another time, you can average out a houses consumption (for a 3 bed house) at 1.5kW when calculating the size of substation required (these figures have been arrived at by the energy companies experience) an electric vehicle charger is either charging or not charging, when it is charging it is using its full capacity, so diversification cannot be factored in it has to be assumed it is running all the time (mainly because they havent been around long enough for the utility companies to come to a diversified figure, as presumably they will all have vehicles plugged in overnight) so a full 16kW has to be accounted for every charging point (for slow overnight chargers- more for fast chargers) this a standard 1000kW substation can supply over 600 houses, but only 60 charging points, so in this case for each of those houses to have a charging points 11 substations would be required (1 for the houses, 10 to charge the vehicles).

Part of this rise will no doubt be the amount of new to boating novices among the hirers, with the staycations this year.

realistically at the moment boats are running 30 year old engine tech over what is in current state of the art car tech, I would imagine the lag behind any new tech will be a similar proposition, so fuel cells will have been in cars and proven cheap reliable tech before we get to see them in boats in my view.

the big question is whether the fuel cell technology is currently robust enough and priced at an affordable level for current installation, to be honest i see it as the step after going electric, to replace the need to plug in, hydrogen fuel can be pumped on board as fast as a tank of fuel can.

no that was me, i did a forum upgrade and when it came back it had gone horribly wrong, the hosts did admit to a couple of bugs in their upgrade though.

No, because i am still getting email notifications

Though unless i strike lucky I still cant see where any new posts have been made

we had to wait for the hosts management to come into work as they are the only ones with the access needed, still not fixed, but at least sort of working. we are still working on it though.

we have a temporary workaround. if you can find an image (or missing image icon) and click to open it, it will bring up a security warning, its saying the image links are unsecure (we know they are fine, but its saying the security certificate is invalid) but if you accept to view anyway, then go back, you will see a more normal forum view, that is at least half useful. the site will then show as non secure, but you will be able to see it.

hows this for a new one supposedly from HM Courts an Tribunal services, issuing a fixed penalty notice So i have infringed a charging area, in a vehicle at some unspecified time somewhere in the uk. and this is supposed to be an HM government email address. I dont think i will be clicking on any of those links thank you.

no its not a money issue, its more a technical support issue, we are chasing them

The big problem is that we are working with the hosts on this and they are in America, so we end up waiting for them, also the staff with the necessary access to access the backups don't work weekends. Sent from the Norfolk Broads Network mobile app

yes the app is working ok

if you can read the forum in an almost normal format but have junk covering parts of the screen the 4.2 theme (at the bottom of the page gives an almost useable view of the forum, i can get this on one computer, but on others i get a basic non themed view.

dont worry even us techies are trying to find our way round today.

it took 2 days charging at beccles to get him to a point to start the return leg

What we have also to consider is that when the Broads Authority installed the posts, by the standards of the time they were sufficient to charge the lead acid batteries that were then the current technology. technology has moved on, now batteries can be charged in a lot shorter time, we have lithium technology, this can be charged much more effectively, but takes significantly more power to do so, thus the technology installed back then (and since) is insufficient to do the job. That said boat technology lags behind car technology, so as far as i know boats dont yet have the batteries that cars do. There is an old wooden boat that manages the trip from potter heigham all the way down to Beccles for the wooden boat show, it has all electric drive, and relies upon those charging posts to charge up its standard lead acid batteries every night.

the trouble is EV charging points are not 32A a standard EV charge post (with 2 outlets) is 32kW or 133A, or 66A per charge point and thats not one of the high power fast chargers, thats for an overnight charge. so at 32A you would be getting half a charge overnight, and need a full day on the 32A point, just to get you back up to full capacity.

we tried doing the update to fix the other issues people were having, unfortunately this seems to have completely changed the format and lost the link to all the images, i hate it when they change things and everything stops working as it should, we are doing our best to restore normality, but i cant give you a timescale for a fix.

at the moment we are having issues with the images etc on the forum, please bear with us

yes the upgrade seems to have broken things, looking into it

there is an update we havent applied yet that may sort it out (or may break things even worse.)