Boydens - Life at Home | Winter 2022 - Issue 01

boydens.co.uk Sustainability Our everyday lives and routines will almost certainly change as a result of our relationship with the electric car. We may adopt new routines such as charging our vehicles while we shop, at our place of work, or even using one of the new charging forecourts (a successor of the petrol station) such as the Gridserve site in Braintree. Your electric car may one day help power your home For electricity grid operators, the opportunities presented by the electric car revolution is tempered by hand over battery management to the energy supplier. By charging the battery when electricity is cheap and selling electricity back to the grid to help balance high demand (when electricity is expensive), there exists the potential for car users to save money to cover the cost of charging their car. Looking ahead to the future, we may see more homes built with a balanced system of energy use whereby electricity is generated by solar energy during the day and stored in batteries, which is then used to power the house at night. Boydens goes all electric At Boydens, we have been undertaking our own quiet ‘electric revolution’ with the purchase of a fully electric Mini, with another due to arrive later this year in addition to six further hybrid vehicles. Watch this space! Pictured are Colchester Sales Manager, Natalie Abrahams, alongside Philip and David Boyden. More electric and hybrid vehicles will join the Boydens fleet in 2022. considerations of how they will be powered and its impact on the grid itself. Government goals to meet the net zero carbon targets mean that as much of the power generated as possible should be from renewable sources, and so a key challenge will be balancing the grid and managing the peaks and troughs of demand. Part of the solution to this problem could lie in electric vehicles themselves and the batteries within them storing the energy. Trials have been undertaken between vehicle manufacturers and energy suppliers in schemes where car owners can 62

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