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Electric Cars Won't Strain the Power Grid
thecarchik writes "Last week's heat wave prompted another eruption of that perennial question: Won't electric cars that recharge from grid power overload the nation's electricity system? The short answer is no. A comprehensive and wide-ranging two-volume study from 2007, Environmental Assessment of Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles, looked at the impact of plug-in vehicles on the US electrical grid. It also analyzed the 'wells-to-wheels' carbon emissions of plug-ins versus gasoline cars. The load of one plug-in recharging (about 2 kilowatts) is roughly the same as that of four or five plasma television sets. Plasma TVs hardly brought worries about grid crashes."
The more uses of electricity we have that can be done "whenever", the better the future looks for power sources like wind and solar. Hopefully power companies will start charging different rates for on-peak and off-peak residential usage (like they already do for major industrial users), and the market will take care of it.
I think there are roughly 2 houses on my block (of about 20 homes) that have a single plasma TV. They do, however, have at least a single car. Many of them have 2 or more. That translates as a lot of "plasma TVs" on that block.
Also, we need to realize that they are limiting their expectations:
Basically they are saying "Electric cars wont bring down the grid -- if they aren't widely adopted". What if, instead of half a million, there's 10-30 million? How many "plasma TVs" does it take to bring down the grid? Add to this that our current administration wants to increase the cost of our energy -- so not only will gas be more expensive, but so will electricity. What's the incentive?
you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it
Not sure how that works. Is there a dummy load set up somewhere? In reality I expect the peak load generators to shut down at night and base load generators to shut down as much as they can. I assume that low load conditions would lead to problems keeping generators in phase.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.)
Actually you can. You turn off four plants and keep two at half load. When there is a surge then the two plants can handle it, and when the surge is sustained then you turn on another plant.
But typically turning on the plant off and on costs more than keeping it on in the first place, so you just add incandescent light bulbs all over the power plant to use as much as running the plant at the minimum produces.
"They" have speculated that electric cars could be used for load leveling. In other words, the car's charger would be controlled by the power company ... just like all your other large appliances.
They're already doing this kind of thing with electric water heaters (and have been doing so for years).
You were being funny, but I think it's important to point out: we produce about 14 exajoules of energy for electric power a year. We use about 28 exajoules for transportation.
This study seemed to overlook something rather important.
FanFictionRecs.net
That assumes people only plug in their electric car at night and not as soon as they return from home. This also assumes they don't plug in their car while they are at work.
More likely the car wll be like your phone. Plug it in when convenient and don't think about it too much.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The only thing the electric car threatens is 160 billion dollars of income every year for the 2 billion barrels of oil we wouldn't have to import for finished motor fuel, if 2/3 of the country switched to electric. There's also the terror of reliable electric drive trains, fewer moving parts, and the closure of tens of thousands of gas stations.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/doe_study_offpe.html
Current batteries for PHEVs could store the energy for driving the national average commute—about 33 miles round trip a day—so the study presumes that drivers would charge up overnight when demand for electricity is much lower.
Researchers found that in the Midwest and East, there is sufficient off-peak generation, transmission and distribution capacity to provide for all of today’s vehicles if they ran on batteries.
However, in the West, and specifically the Pacific Northwest, there is limited extra electricity because of the large amount of hydroelectric generation that is already heavily utilized, and increasing electricity from hydroelectric plants is difficult.
We were very conservative in looking at the idle capacity of power generation assets. The estimates didn’t include hydro, renewables or nuclear plants. It also didn’t include plants designed to meet peak demand because they don’t operate continuously. We still found that across the country 84 percent of the additional electricity demand created by PHEVs could be met by idle generation capacity.
—Michael Kintner-Meyer, PNNL [DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory]
The study also looked at the impact on the environment of an all-out move to PHEVs. The added electricity would come from a combination of coal-fired and natural gas-fired plants. Even with today’s power plants emitting greenhouse gases, the overall levels would be reduced because the entire process of moving a car one mile is more efficient using electricity than producing gasoline and burning it in a car’s engine...
But typically turning on the plant off and on costs more than keeping it on in the first place, so you just add incandescent light bulbs all over the power plant to use as much as running the plant at the minimum produces.
Surely thats a joke. I could believe hydroelectric storage: pump water against gravity, or selling the power to a neighboring network.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
How easily the misleading figures slide past and become accepted truth when nobody questions them. "The load of one plug-in recharging (about 2 kilowatts) is roughly the same as that of four or five plasma television sets."? Hardly. Current 50" Panasonic plasma TV on calibrated power settings: 215.57 watts (source CNET.com). Your math is off by a factor of 2.
That's a good point. I'm curious to know also if the battery production was taken into account when they decided electric vehicles would be better.
Surely from a pure power plant versus tailpipe emissions, the power plant won out. They scale better than auto gas engines do.
I'm still on the fence about lead. I'm glad it's gone from a lot of industrial and consumer products, but at the same time it did serve a valuable purpose. And when it comes to batteries, lead-acid batteries are dead simple to recycle. Lithium on the other hand isn't.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/sudden-surplus-calls-for-quick-thinking/
Columbia is accustomed to reducing power to 85 percent and sometimes 60 percent. In the following days, however, BPA asked the nuclear [note: I added "nuclear" for context] plant operators to go down to just 22 percent. “This year was extraordinary because it all came so heavy and so fast,’’ Mr. Milstein said.
So, being in that particular biz, would you like to comment on why, during the heat wave Boston suffered through much of the last few weeks, why Boston Fire Department spent most of its time responding to downed wires, transformer fires, manhole fires, etc? Seems to me like the grid is pushed to the seams already if large numbers of pieces of it are catching fire on hot days when electrical demand is highest thanks to AC units.
Please help metamoderate.
In future, it won't be enough to let a consumer make the decision on when to consume and encourage him with discounts in low peak hours. The model should be that for those loads where "time doesn't matter" we (the consumer) can indicate our constraints and then the electricity company will work within those boundaries. Of course, the more lenient the consumer is, the better rate he gets.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. As a time of day electricity user, my utility sends me a forecast of power costs for the next day broken up by hour, and I can plan my energy use accordingly. So, in the future, you'll be able to tell devices in your home above what cost threshold they shouldn't run (with the devices fetching the current and predicted cost of power via a web service). So you work around the energy company and their constraints based on the market price of power in your area.
Here is the graph from my provider:
https://il.thewattspot.com/login.do?method=showChart
You really shouldn't be happy about the lead. Since the switchover I have noticed a LOT more things such as everything from motherboards to DVD players "just dying" a lot sooner than they should. After taking a few of them to a retired engineer down the hall that is a wiz with a soldering iron he confirmed what I already suspected: the new solder fails much easier than the old. I'd say a good 85%+ of the pre-solder stuff I have is functioning well, while I've noticed a good 40%+ failure rate of the new solder soon after the warranty expires.
So while I can't give you hard numbers to crunch, just from watching the amount of e-waste being generated by my own family I'd say the new solder is adding a good 30-40% when it comes to premature failures. I have a feeling if someone were to sit down and do a study of the lifespan of these common consumer devices before and after the solder switch, that we'd find the amount of e-waste being generated and resources wasted (don't forget it is not just the disposal, but the amount of carbon, resources, and energy required to make these devices that is also being wasted) that the lead solder was much better for the environment on the whole than the new stuff.
This is why I pointed out the entire lifecycle needs to be taken into account. Sadly I have noticed that many are so quick to jump on anything "green" that hard data isn't taken into account before the switch. I'm all for tech that makes the world a better place to live in, but we really need to look at the "cradle to the grave" of a particular solution before deciding that one is better than the other. There may be hidden externalizations not being taken into account that might make a tech much worse long term.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Must be trickle charge, surely not using a rapid charger to get home to the kids quickly due to an illness at school. The more you charge them batteries, the faster they wear out. Where do we dispose of them? What about ac lighits, heater on, that drains the batteries. The power distribution lines are quite old, and contrary to folks, takes alot of maintenance. I for one will by a gas generator, since I suspect more brownouts will occur.
We do, but keep in mind that an ICE is only about 18%to 19% efficient (the engine itself is about 20% http://courses.washington.edu/me341/oct22v2.htm, but not all of that gets to the pavement - 80%+ of the energy from burning gasoline ends up as heat or sound. Electric cars on the other hand are much more efficient - about 70% of what ends up in the battery goes to turning the wheels. http://ec.europa.eu/transport/urban/vehicles/road/electric_en.htm .
Then you have delivery and fuel management. With gasoline, you used a lot of energy in the refining process, and then you have to put it in trucks and deliver it. Of course, transmitting electricity has it's problems as well - the average line loss is somewhere around 6.5%, and the uranium for nuclear plants, and the coal, natural gas and fuel oil needs to be obtained and refined, so I would call this one a wash, with perhaps an edge to electric since sending electricity down the wire is more efficient than delivering the fuel by truck
On average electricity generating stations (hydro excepted) are about 35% to 40% efficient. of that about 93.5% gets to your outlet. Of that 99.8% gets to the battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_polymer_battery from the charger, and 99.8% gets from the battery to the motor (there are some minimal losses in the battery cables)
Bottom line is that (not counting transmission and production expenditures) assuming a quantity of energy: Joules x .998 x .998 x .70 = .697Joules for electric car, and .20 Joules for an ICE. An electric car is more than 3 times as efficient as an ICE powered car.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Correction: People will drive the car when it becomes like your phone. Plug it in when convenient and don't think about it too much.
My parents had cell phones back when it was common to leave them off unless it was an emergency in order to conserve battery life. Now I leave mine on unless I absolutely have to turn it off. I can go for a week without charging.
With the distance I live from my work, I can go about 3 weeks without fueling my truck. It's got a 25-gallon tank. If I were to buy an electric I'd have to find a place to plug it in at my apartment, and I couldn't go a day without charging it. Analysts frequently underestimate how much of a pain in the ass it is for normal people to "fit" an electric car into their lives. Of course that limited range makes an excellent anti-theft device. Simply run the battery down and nobody will be able to steal it.
i think the whole study is misleading. the off peak scheme only works because not much power is in use at that time. what do you think will happen when every man and his dog have an electric car that charges during "off peak"? thats right, it'll suddenly be peak time, and the cheap power gravy train will be over.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
hybrids are not better.
petrol engines has peak efficiency around 35% while diesels around 42%.
old coal / gas plant gets around 35, modern 45-48. and we have losses at generator (lets say around 10%), 5-15% of losses in electricity grid (numbers vary a lot), 80-90% efficiency of battery charging and 80-90 again for taking the energy out of batteries. and then 10% of losses of electric motor.
is that better then ice ? if ICE works at half of the maximum efficiency, it is still around the same.
and charging will be a problem. first, no idea where the 2kW charger came from. that is total BS. tesla roadster got 42kWh batteries, so with 2kW charger you will fully charge it in 21 hours !
to charge the 42kWh car in around 8 hours, you will need 5.5kW charger. and bigger cars with bigger batteries will require longer time or more charging power.
and even if the 2kW figure would be true. if million people come from work and each of them turn on the crappy 2kW charger, I will easily double the electric consumption of family !
Actually... I'll go ahead and do the math. Surface areas:
Superior: 82,400 km^3
Michigan-Huron: 59,600 + 58,000 km^3 = 117,600 km^3
So, if we want to cap off a maximum change of a mere 0.5 meter of height, and assuming that such a small amount has basically no affect on the surface area, that's 41.2 cubic kilometers. There's 4 meters height difference between the lakes; let's assume we average maintaining that difference. That would store about 350 GWh after losses -- more than the total generation of all hydroelectricity in the United States for an entire year.
But want an even crazier one? The Panama Canal is a (proportionally) thin canal that goes over the terrain via locks. But imagine if you had pipes connecting Atlantic to Pacific. It just so happens that the western and eastern coasts of Panama have opposite tides, and the magnitude of the tides is *far* greater on the Pacific tide -- averaging about 3 meters (the Atlantic side averages under half a meter). So you have basically limitless (oscillating) tidal power available.
IF you can harvest it.... ;)
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
In Denmark they plan to introduce battery switch stations, where you replace your depleted battery recharged one. The batteries are owned by the recharging company, and they are charged at night when electricity is cheap. I believe that an electric car can drive aroung 60 kilometers on a battery, so a day will require a series of battery switches. http://www.betterplace.com/the-solution
Dude, what is so difficult to understand in "you don't need that powerful electric motors to achieve same performance"?
Electric motors are far more efficient, they accelerate faster, and, most important, the V8 engine of your neighbour with lots of HP has got all this power only at its peak in a very narrow RPM band. Electric motors have got a linear rating. So an electric car with the engine rated the same as a car with an ICE engine will accelerate much faster than the ICE car. So much for that.
And if you want to get personal - I don't even own a car because I like walking very much and because I've got to sit the whoe day on my arse at work I need every bit of walking I can get in my free time.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Given that the rant in the parent post had nothing whatsoever to do with the text he had quoted, it seems that we have a trollbot in our hands, since a human troll wouldn't bother quoting. Any guesses if this is a new algorithm or the return of some classic? Or just some kind of randomly posting spambot?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You have limitless tidal power available at any coast: simply dig a reservoir (a bay connected to the ocean through a small channel) and harvest the energy as water flows in and out. You also get a massive swimming pool/dozen kilometers of beachfront property out of the deal.
Digging those reservoirs would be a useful, unskilled, and labour-intensive project. We have a massive pool of people needing jobs. Hint, hint.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
This is the true future "green" tech that will solve our energy problems.
Our true energy problem isn't production it is storage. Can you imagine if every home had a block that could store enough electricity for 6 hours of running their entire house(more if you turned off the stove and heaters) You could use Solar/wind power to trickle charge it and the mains to keep it full up when you needed to at night.
Small businesses would also benefit greatly. It would stabilize the overall grid, brown outs would all be gone and blackouts would only be caused by long term effects(like a major storm) not too many air conditionaers
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You missed the point. Given the choice of vehicles with various performance bonuses vs other personal economic factors, the thought that a more powerful car may put extra load on the grid would rate below the number of cupholders a car has in the consumer list of deciding factors.
People won't pick a car with the same performance if a more powerful option is available, marketers know that and will will bolt high kW motors in given the option. Saying but you can achieve the same performance with a lower power engine appeals to greenies only. End result, high load on the grid.
To put that another way, a 100m rise with a reservoir that's 50m by 50m by 10m stores 5 MWh, enough to run 200,000 houses for an entire day
Is this supposed to be problematic?.
Yes, very.
5MWh for 200,000 houses is 25 Watt-hours each, or a continuous load of about 1 Watt for a day. That would be about enough for one torch [flashlight] bulb. Are these hen-houses?
I am an engineering for a large utility in the US, granted Civil not Electrical, but the principal for generation is:
You produce a little spare power that is grounded to handle increases (your buffer)
There are voltage regulators and capacitor banks at substations to handle small variations in load
Utilize peaking stations when the load on the grid is particularly high
The key for generation: RPM of the turbine, as load on the grid decreases it take less energy to maintain the speed of the turbine; so while a turbine may still be spinning at the same speed during high and low demand it is certainly not consuming as much fuel
With that being said, there is certainly a lag between the consumption of fuel and the utilization of that energy (steam to mechanical motion) that may produce a delay of an hour as load decreases. Utility companies have a great deal of data and they can generally predict when usage will change and adjust the fuel consumption accordingly.
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
I suspect the Prius can accelerate fast enough, but the Prius driver is too occupied with playing the "how efficiently can I drive" game.
The Prius isn't a fast car but doesn't seem terribly slow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh_lKNAh4Sk&feature=related
If that level of acceleration is still not enough to merge safely, then that section of the highway is badly (and unsafely) designed. I do not see it as a problem with the car.
If you do not design highways and stuff for "slower" drivers, then the next step may be more stringent certification and requirements. That's not going to go well with the voters when most find out that they and/or their cars are just not good enough.
My car is definitely unable to accelerate faster than a Prius. I'm not the safest or best of drivers but I've driven for about a decade (maybe more) without crashing into a car or another car crashing into me. Have not hit any people (no dogs or cats either). And on my first time on a go-kart race track I was just a bit above average pace in the group of 30 drivers. So if me and my car don't make the grade, I bet a lot of others wouldn't either.
I hate to break this to you, mister racist teabagger, but welfare as an entitlement ended in 1996. You can't even get food stamps in most states unless you work. These days only the rich get welfare.
Too bad they can't mod you down any farther.
Free Martian Whores!
Yep, with those sort of ranges, there's not much use for electric cars. I live in a city center so for about half my car use, those might be okay. However, the other half (pre time I use a car, not milage) when I can't just walk or take the public transit, I'm heading a minimum of 50 miles away and usually more like 100+. The only car that might be useful would be the Tesla with full options. The rest effectively aren't useful enough for me to deal without some sort of gas driven car. No hiking, camping, seeing friends and family in nearby cities. If I still lived in the suburb of a midwestern city, it was not uncommon to drive 100+ miles in one night. Drive into town and shop at a store, go to a friends, go to a night club, drive home. When I was in Houston, just getting in my car to go anywhere seemed like a two hour round trip on the highway. Since in the midwest, one has to drive to anything and it's usually a significant ways away, they really don't look useful for anything.
This raises the question, what does one do when your electric car runs out of juice? You can't really just pick up the battery and carry it to a station to recharge to get enough charge to get to that station with the car. Can a tow truck come charge you up enough to do so? Or do you have to get towed. Given the way my laptop batteries are with inaccurate readings or just cutting out when they get old, I really worry about electric cars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky