Daily Archives: September 6, 2017

Industry gears up for WLTP introduction

Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, Pollution

In just a week’s time, the EU’s new more rigorous emissions test, the Worldwide Harmonised Light Vehicle Test Procedure (WLTP) will finally be rolled out, two years after news of the Volkswagen emissions scandal first broke.

It will apply to all new car type model approvals from September 2017 onwards, replacing the previous NEDC procedure, and incorporate real world driving conditions into the test for the first time, as well testing with optional equipment fitted, to give a truer impression of vehicle emissions on the road.

It is hoped the new WLTP test, alongside software updates and scrappage incentive schemes announced following the Berlin diesel summit earlier this month, will help restore political and public confidence in the EU emissions testing procedure following Dieselgate, and avert costly diesel driving bans.

The new WLTP emission test has enormously far-reaching implications, affecting pricing, residual values, sales volumes and revenues. Premium brands who previously NEDC-tested their vehicles without popular optional equipment installed are likely to see the greatest increase in their fuel economy and emissions figures, due to the additional weight these add to the car.

Japanese and Korean OEMs such as Toyota and Hyundai are expected to benefit the most from the new testing procedure, due to their typical strategy of including higher levels of specification in their cars as standard to compete with their European rivals, at a similar price point.

Some more confident OEMs have already started publishing WLTP CO2 and mpg (miles per gallon) figures for their new models alongside the NEDC figures. However, with all new models launching from September forced to publish WLTP figures, and with some manufacturers having developed more sophisticated methods to optimise their vehicles for the outgoing NEDC test, it is expected that a considerable number of headline-grabbing shocks are on the cards. Figures from some models could suddenly be significantly higher than competitor models they previously outperformed, and this could also result in changes to marketing strategies.

Read more: Autovista Group

Electric cars charging in Milton Keynes (Image: T. Larkum)

National Grid issues EV grid demand fact check after misreporting

Charging, Electric Cars, News, Reviews and Comment

National Grid has moved to dispel various misconceptions over its projections for extra power demand triggered by an electric vehicle revolution in the UK.

Electric cars charging in Milton Keynes (Image: T. Larkum)
Electric cars charging in Milton Keynes (Image: T. Larkum)

Earlier this summer the UK government pledged to ban the sale of all new conventional petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040, promoting a wider switch to hybrid and pure electric vehicles.

That announcement coincidentally followed the publication of National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios (FES), within which the system operator established various scenarios of EV uptake and how they would impact on overall power demand.

But while National Grid had the best intentions for including such estimates, today’s ‘myth buster’ document argues that they have been “cited incorrectly and sometimes out of context” by national media outlets.

National Grid appears to have been particularly irked by a number of articles which claimed that it had said that a mass uptake of EVs would require as much as 30GW of new generating capacity. One report in particular went as far as to suggest that this would require “ten new nuke plants” to be built in the UK.

The SO has thus moved to stress that the FES document is not to be regarded as an accurate forecast, but a “set of four credible pathways” for electricity demand out to 2050. EV peak demand in those four scenarios ranged between 4 – 10GW, with the “best fit” scenario placed at around 5GW.

This, National Grid stressed, would equate to an 8% increase on today’s peak demand value and far from the “ten new nuke plants” some media outlets had claimed.

National Grid indicated that the 30GW figure appeared to have been spun out of a more extreme scenario included in the FES document for the first time, dubbed ‘High EV’, which was designed to be an outlier and was based on a number of outlying predictions, typically that conventional vehicle sales would have been stopped by 2025 and that society was prosperous enough to allow 85% of people to charge their vehicles at peak time.

Read more: Clean Energy News