@Silvaire the grid doesn’t store electricity it just transports it.
@Peter the infrastructure for electric vehicle charging will not be from the public purse, it will be paid for by private enterprise who will go on to make a huge amount of money from said infrastructure. It may well be facilitated by the actions of government.
For anyone who is interested in the conversion efficiencies of electric v fossil fuels just take a trip down to your local cooker salesroom. Take 2 cookers, exactly the same make 1 all electric and 1 gas. The instruction book that goes with it will usually have cooking instructions. Compare the energy involved to cook a chicken with electric to those for gas and work out the cost difference. That’s the way most of us would decide whether to buy electric anything v fossil fuel anything.
That’s apart from the fact that IMO a greater proportion of the European population than that of the USA believe that climate change is real and is probably man made.
Politics aside, I believe EVs are (finally) a practical solution to personal transport, both short and long distance, and that most of the obstacles to adoption have now been sorted. I believe this because I have two of them and use them in all the ways I previously used ICE cars, and because we are already seeing mass adoption in some countries. They are simpler, easier to maintain, much quieter, and more reliable, and they produce no emissions.
Compare the energy involved to cook a chicken with electric to those for gas and work out the cost difference
Microwaving is probably the most economical 
Microwave a chicken YUK 🙂
@Gallois, I once worked a bit on SMES so I have some familiarity with the potential of large scale storage on the grid. Pumping water uphill is likely more practical, but very expensive.
I’m smiling about the comment directly above that EVs produce no emissions, after all the discussion about their emissions. For some they really are an element in a quasi religious belief system.
The UK has a pumped water storage system in the Snowdon area at Dinorwig. It works well especially when electricity demand is low so that one can pump the water up the mountain using low cost electricity.
But that isn’t really the same as electricity hanging about in the grid system waiting to be used. Which of course it does not do.
I visited that place in the mountains on a college trip. Fascinating, but none were ever built again, for some reason.
Having been involved in the “solar” business in the 1970s and 1980s, and having seen just about anything screwed to the roof of a house rot to pieces within 20 years (and usually much faster), I would be absolutely astonished if photovoltaic → battery → charging an electric car at night, will be, to use the ultra fashionable word, sustainable. The batteries will be gone long before 20 years, the chances of the electronics still working will be some small %, the vendor will have long gone bust. Well probably not Siemens, Stiebel Eltron, etc, but the product. This stuff costs a lot of energy and money to manufacture and it just doesn’t last that long. It isn’t like your house, made of bricks and roof tiles. An old Toyota (I had a Celica for 15 years) will last longer than any such system, will have a residual value of £1, cost £300/year in maintenance but hey you have a car for that, and will go on until rust gets it too badly. An old woman down the road here can’t sell her house because the water connections from the solar panels, passing through the roof, are leaking when it rains, the contract prevents her removing the system but she has to pay for repairs, and thousands are in the same boat. Nearly all the people selling “solar” are (and always were, when I was making the controllers for these) crooks, shysters, wide boys, conmen, and opportunists. Just like doors, windows, in fact most things which cost real money in a house. You don’t want the story about our 4 patio doors, top of the range Swedish product, leaking when it rains a lot, thrown in by crooks who changed their SIM cards after each job, and I had to solve it by building an aluminium “gutter” on the inside of the door!
Most stuff just doesn’t work long-term, not for the time spans which are needed to make the return on investment numbers add up. It is a huge challenge. It can be done with low power electronics (I have my products out there running after 30 years) but anything that is big, moves, gets warm, is chemical, etc, forget it. Some wind turbines were found to last just 5 years, although this is bound to improve (go to Greece whey they can’t afford to fix them after the EU money ran out and count the numbers where the thing is about to fall off).
Maybe I am too old and have seen too much 
I will ask about that charging cable But in the meantime, wait for it … the charging point opposite their house has stopped working. It has gone “offline”. Have the chinese hacked it? The Ukrainians hacked a load of such stuff in Russia
Silvaire wrote:
I’m smiling about the comment directly above that EVs produce no emissions, after all the discussion about their emissions.
What emissions do they produce? The process of manufacturing them creates emissions, and they consume power, which may or may not be associated with the creation of emissions depending on the source. But the car itself produces no emissions.
Peter wrote:
Sounds like the Swedish govt has capped the profit margins of the companies operating these. Here the margins are huge.
It has not. Swedish economic policy since many years is actually very market-oriented.
There are pumped storage electricity generating systems in Scotland, and I think more under construction.
There are battery storage systems for the grid with planning permission granted. I think there are large scale ones elsewhere. (Australia??)
The UK offshore wind farms are increasing fast. Whether they ever recoup the energy being freely used to build them will eventually be seen.
