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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."
...most people buy electric SUV's? Didn't think that one through, did they? :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I mean for the most part you come home, you plug your car in. So, just have the car delay and charge off peak. Not a lot of usage at 3am normally and all the cars could be happily charging away.
Being in that particular biz, I can say I am not concerned about it. Most of our power goes to industrial loads anyway. Joe Consumer is only a real concern to us on those hot mid July afternoons when he is at work running his air conditioner at the same time as the thirty million others Joes. Now, if they were to ALL buy electric vehicles and charge them in the afternoon in the middle of the summer while at work.. hah well, I think the major load on the charging systems would either be early morning when you just get to work and plug in, or early evening when you just get home and plug in. Not exactly prime time for brown outs..
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
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 admit I didn't have time to read the study thoroughly, but:
(a) The study specifically talks about hybrid cars, not pure electrics; the headline is misleading.
(b) Let's take a very conservative estimate and say an electric car draws an average of 10hp when driving. That's about 7.5kw. Let's round that up to 8 for simplicity's sake, and if we assume 100% efficiency, the car needs to spend 4 minutes on the charger for every 1 minute it spends on the road. If we charge it overnight (8 hours), that's 2 hours of driving time, or 60 miles if you average (as many drivers do) somewhere around 30mph - before you have to plug it back in for another 8 hours. And that's in the absolutely best case.
I might be missing something, but 2kw to charge sounds very unrealistic to me.
This IEEE article (http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/speed-bumps-ahead-for-electricvehicle-charging) states a Level 2 EV charger can draw as much as 6.6 kilowatts.
Yes but plasma TVs replaced CRT TVs.
And I expect there was a rather large switch from incandescent to compact fluorescent globes around the same time - which may have given greater savings than losses from those plasmas....
But what on earth kind of argument is that? Electric cars wont be a problem coz plasma TVs weren't.... How absurd.
Never happened. True story.
Hopefully power companies will start charging different rates for on-peak and off-peak residential usage...
Say goodbye another reason to get CFLs then. They mostly provide light at night, but if power becomes cheap (or even free, or in rare cases PROFITABLE) at night, who will want to use them?
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.)
If they decide to charge during the day (for example, if people charge them at work), it could strain the grid. Particularly if they charge during hot summer afternoons.
Unless a significant part of the grid goes to solar, which produces the highest power during the daytime at summer, of course.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Probably because households buying plasma televisions purchase one, maybe two, and they are replacing cathode tube (with shadow mask) televisions which have been consuming electric load since the 1950s. And those plasma TVs are not operating for too many hours (hopefully), never mind that LCD televisions are far more popular. It's not surprising that many people are at least more concerned when typical two-car households each might add the equivalent of 8 to 10 plasma televisions of net new electricity consumption to the grid. Thankfully that consumption should be off-peak, especially if timed chargers and peak electricity pricing are mandated, but the plasma TV analogy breaks down very quickly.
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?
Yes, but there are two issues with this. Firstly, most of the plasma televisions purchased replaced older CRTs. In cases where there wasn't a significant difference in screen size between the plasma TV and the CRT it replaced, overall draw would fall.
Secondly, I really don't see the average family owning 4 or 5 50" plasma televisions (especially since plasma has fallen behind the more efficient LCD.) Every family owns a car, and if the technology improves sufficiently in terms of cost and practicality, I could imagine them becoming somewhat common in the foreseeable future, especially since owning two vehicles are very common where I live.
With today's technology, a family could easily own an electric for commuting and errands, plus a gasoline car for long distance travel. Quick change batteries and fast charging systems may make electric cars suitable for long distance travel, as well.
We don't need to worry about electric cars overloading power grids, we're already doing it right now.
You can't possibly say that the rolling blackouts and brownouts of the California power grid are "normal operating procedures" for a power system working within it's capacity, let alone a sign they have any surplus room for recharging electric vehicles.
Just like most working people, the first thing I always do when I get home is turn on my 4 or 5 plasma TVs. Since that wasn't a problem, I'm sure the electric car I buy won't be a problem either!
It may very well not be a problem, but that statement is goddamn stupid. Most of us aren't drawing that much power regularly when you get home.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Getting enough of the materials to make the batteries for a significant number of electric vehicles. And then the fact that you have to replace a major and expensive component of your vehicle (batteries) every 3-5 years.
They'll still be worthwhile. Do some calcs. CFLs are an amazingly sensible investment compared to almost anything else.
From memory it's about an 18 fold return. Even if your 'off-peak' (btw evening isn't off-peak) power price is half the average price you're still looking at a 9:1 ROI.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
TV's weren't a problem. So 5 times as many won't either.
Why are people so short-sighted. If you're running out of power now, needing way more won't help.
That said, as I said before, capitalist societies solve enormous problems quickly, and don't big problems at all.
Yes. Millions of batteries connected to the power system is a good thing. In some way it's like building massive amounts of pumped storage.
No wind blowing at the moment? Then don't charge the 90% of cars which are on 'economy-charger' setting. Lots of wind blowing? Charge every car to full and use that wind!
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
If Obama wants to do something effective, easy, and popular, he should announce a push towards electric cars. If he announced $20 billion was going this year towards research making affordable electric cars, it would do something for the environment AND would help reduce dependence on foreign oil. These are things that everyone favors. It would be good for the economy, not so much because it would create jobs, but because it would reduce the $400 billion dollars a year we spend on foreign oil. That is money we could spend at home for things we want instead of to import oil to drive us around (and sponsor terrorists and organized crime).
Qxe4
Of course it would have an impact. First, you still have your 2.5 TVs (most of which are not plasma). Now add your eCAR or 5 more TV's per house hold. But wait the average number of cars per household is something like 2.5, so we will go with 12 new plasma TVs per household. So, 115,000,000 households x 12 new plasma TVs = 1 Billion, 380 Million new plasma TVs plugged into the wall. If you cut that number in half it would still create some kind of strain. But at least there's that report thats says it wont.
Serving all you classic gaming needs from Asteroids to Zaxxon.
The 2kw load is based on the fact that you would plug in at home and charge it only at night times. This business model of plugin hybrids is impractical on many fronts. Alternatively, where by electric recharge stations are set up to charge the cars much faster (typically under 15 mins). The load of each one of those charging stations is close to 75 kw. If you replace 10-12 pumps (your typical gas station capacity) with 10-12 charging station each one will be running close to a MW!!! Thats enough power to power 1000 homes!! How is that for overloading the grid?
What a great idea. And they could market it under a clever name like "time-of-use"or something equally catchy.
also you need add the cable / sat box draw running 24/7 back in the days where cathode tube ones where all over the place you did not need the cable box that much.
With today's cable box leavening them off most of the day is not a good idea.
"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).
After we roll out the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid/ and technology, then electric car owners will be able to sell their power back to the grid during peak usage to prevent blackouts, then recharge their car at night. Everyone wins - the owners electric bill is reduced, the utility avoids a blackout, and everyone else enjoys their AC. So - how many electric cars would it have taken to prevent the Enron blackouts?
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.
They already do in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
The load of one plug-in recharging (about 2 kilowatts) is roughly the same as that of four or five plasma television sets.
Sorry, I don't understand this idea of power rated by plasma TVs. Could you please give that in terms of the number of slow cookers required to have the same draw as one EV charge?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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.
For this example, if I park my car at the office I don't care if the battery gets reloaded at 11 am of after lunch. As long as it's done before I drive home at 5 PM. Same for the return trip, the car could be rechared at 11PM or at 3AM, I don't care.
The crucial thing here is that fore heavier, but also time independent loads like this, your utility company gets control over when you are using electricity. We're still quite a bit away from that, but with smart grids, that's the way we're going.
And it will all benefit green power that produces electricity at "unexpected moments".
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Plasma TVs doesn't take too much power, at least the new models. They always analyze the light conditions surrounding them and set brightness based on that. They also come with that setting as default.
I won't repeat manufacturer claims as we all know they are a bit too ideal. Lets say, I connected it to a 800VA APC UPS (which, I suggest to all equipment owners) and I noticed it can feed for 15 mins along with a H264/HDTV DVR box.
Just wait couple of months until all vendors setup their LED TV etc. contracts, we will hear similar "how evil, horrible LCD is" embedded to stories like that.
While on it, this is exactly why you should never buy the new trendy "electric car" stuff. If tons of coal burns somewhere to feed the electric car, it doesn't really help much compared to lets say, a really small engine/modern/compact car. I know the "hybrid" advantages of course, it is just the way people fool themselves driving me mad.
http://www.google.com/search?q=time+of+day+metering
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...
No wind blowing at the moment?
the total amount of wind blowing is pretty much constant. It varies a bit between places, but because the earth spins at a constant rate, and the sun puts in a constant amount of energy, the total amount of (wind mass)x(wind speed) is constant.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
Really? That's great news. Perhaps you should tell these people: www.hartlandwindfarm.com so that they don't have to build 500MW of thermal plant to backup their 2000MW wind farm.
I thought it was obvious that my statement was referring to the amount of energy produced from wind farms. This isn't the same as 'total amount of wind blowing in the world'. Perhaps I need to explain that in future.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
http://www.sustainabilitycentre.com.au/BaseloadFallacy.pdf
read the part about wind power as base-load.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
...does a big-ass, you-can-see-it-from-the-highway Exxon sign use?
This space available.
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.
You mean the bit where it says: "this system can be made as reliable as a conventional base-load power plant by adding a small amount of peak-load plant".
That's exactly what I said. Furthermore:
"This back-up does not have to have the same capacity as the group of wind farms ... one fifth to one third of the wind capacity"
Even the numbers are the same, my example uses about a quarter.
Reading further in your link. "If and when advanced batteries become less expensive, PV electricity would become base-load"
Sounds like they agree with me.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
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
For a point of comparison, the Nissan Leaf (shipping in the US in December) will charge it's 24KW battery in 8 hours. It has a range of approximately 100 miles.
That makes it 3KW for 8 hours if you are commuting 100 miles every day. If you are only commuting 50 miles per day, that drops to only 1.5KW for an 8 hour nightly charge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
Some blokes put out a leaflet, so now your asshattery shall be ignored? 'Fraid not!
First, assuming constant total wind over the globe, keep in mind there's essentially no wind generation on the oceans -- as more or less of that total constant wind is in the middle of the Pacific, it alters the total available on land.
Second, electrical grids are more-or-less continental in scope, at most. This means that summing the wind over one continent together with the wind in another continent is totally useless for the available power in either continent; when it's blowing harder here, and weaker there, we have a surplus of capacity, and vice versa. It's uneconomical to deliver power across oceans, so you'll just have to fire up some local peak plants.
So you're quite simply wrong before; fortunately for Mark Diesendorf's credibility, that paper you linked says nothing to support you.
Now as for what it does say... did you even read it? They said to match an 1GW base-load plant, you need about 2.6GW of wind, plus a peak-load plant to cover low-wind periods. And you offer that as a refutation of the GGP's suggestion that you could use electric vehicles to take advantage of surplus power when wind (whether at a single site, or summed across several sites) is above average, and reduce the need to switch on peak plants when it's low? Staggering.
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?
The study said 200 million cars, but even a half million isn't going to happen this year or next. Nissan is going to make a few tens of thousands of Leafs over the next two years, and then as much as 140,000 per year (worldwide) starting in 2012. GM is going to start with 10,000 Volts per year and bump that up to 30,000 in 2010. Tesla might be producing 20,000 to 50,000 per year by late 2012.
There's just no way we're going to get anywhere near one tenth the number of cars the study considered in the next five years. The utilities are already planning for EVs today with just a thousand Tesla Roadsters, 900 RAV4-EVs, and a few thousand one-off conversions. The utilities have lots of time to make any adjustments needed to power EVs and provide incentives to encourage off-peak charging.
...will the invention of the train use up all the coal supply? Another question: will the invention of the car use up all the world's oil supply? Which is more plentiful: oil or solar (which causes wind)?
Society use your Sciences
oops, sorry, I tought you were one of the idiots spouting 'wind is no option'. better wait replying to /. posts to when I'm at least 10 minutes awake.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
We have huge amounts of excess power at night that’s why there is usually an off-peak charge on your bill, properly something like 2 cents per KWh. But during the day especially a hot summer afternoon; the whole network is strained and the wholesale electricity price skyrockets (think $2000 per MWh). The trick with electric cars will be allowing owners to plug there car in at work and sell back to the grid. two birds with one stone ; easing the load on the network and making money for the person selling 2 cents at a huge profit (admittedly its hard to get into whole sale electricity business; but corporations could manage it). You don’t want to sell all your power though otherwise you wont be able to get home.
Rocket Surgeon.
As a residential electrician, I can't wait for all electric cars to show up. :)
I make a pretty penny installing 240V outlets (like what your dryer/oven run off of) and upgrading service panels to 240-320V.
However, it would be interesting to see what the impact of say a street with the equivalent of a dozen new clothes dryers, which will take about 700W per car to charge.
Study/.pdf by PG&E
No. Rather, if they think there's a reasonable chance that they will occasionally need to drive further, they will obviously decide that an electric car isn't for them.
Just like if most of the driving will be one person, but they will need to occasionally carry four, a two-seater is simply eliminated. People base their decision on reasonable maximums, not average use. It's not "hate against 'green tech'". It's just an absence of irrational infatuation with it.
That's because Germany is too small.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I believe there are still serious concerns with deployment strategies that put all of our eggs in one basket. Loss of power on the grid as we've seen in the past is crippling. Compound this with the loss of personal transportation is stupefyingly arrogant to pursue. Consider the grid has been in existence for 50 years and was state of the art at the time of its inception. Neglect has set in and expansion is hindered by epic proportions of environmental and bureaucratic red tape. So the question becomes, do we wish to place additional burden on this aging infrastructure without mandating updates and infrastructure improvements? Given the crucial nature of those arteries it seems foolish to run them to capacity all day every day. It's an issue that deserves fudge factor in favor of over engineering. It's also important to understand that the infrastructure and the power generation facilities are two different entities to consider. Power generation facilities from an operations perspective operate at a higher efficiency and reduced maintenance if they can be operated at a constant load. It can take hours to respond to large power loading as commissioning and syncing generators is no small task. Thus continuous load would improve their operations. The grid on the other hand is an aging infrastructure with increasing demand and load. It's capacity and lifespan are finite.
No single raindrop believes it's to blame for the flood.
the car needs to spend 4 minutes on the charger for every 1 minute it spends on the road.
Not quite accurate. The car needs to spend 4 minutes on the charger for every 1 minute it spends moving full speed on the road.
Idle time and deceleration are factors in favor of EVs. In city traffic, your ICE is running constantly, whether or not you are moving. Traffic jam? Red Light? Too bad, you're still burning fuel.
With an electric vehicle, you only use energy when you are moving. Traffic jam? Red Light? No problem, you aren't using any energy (except AC/heating/stereo).
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
As usual, the answer is "it depends", with lots of assumptions you can argue about in the absence of actual data.
A biggie is where the grid electricity comes from.
Another is how long the batteries will last, and how long an electric car will last. There have been studies claiming that a Hummer has lower life cycle emissions than an electric car, but they assume an absurdly long lifetime for Hummer and an absurdly short lifetime (and no recycling) for the EV.
Google "life cycle emissions BEV" or something like it and you'll have many hours of reading material on the matter.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I like the XKCD foras. People have insightful discussion about interesting topics. This subject is long and complicated and a lot of things need consideration. Here are two links for people wanting to go a bit more in depth (be warned : the first is a 20 pages discussion, the second one is a 2 pages discussion forking from the first) :
Let's talk about energy production
ICE, Hybrid, and EV: A discussion of the merits
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
There isn't enough neodymium outside of China to make the required number of high efficiency electric motors.
For fuel cell powered vehicles, there isn't enough platinum on the planet to convert the energy at a useful rate. Organic redox chemists have being working on a platinum substitute for 25 years without success.
Then we need to get into space and start mining it.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Until everyone starts plugging in an electric car at night.
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?
Looking at the actuals vs. the predicted costs in the graph you linked, they underestimated by 30%. Maybe they were just having a bad day.
I don't think he needs to look up "spinning reserve", he has (almost) described it.
Nuclear and the most efficient other power stations provide the base load. Other stations provide spinning reserve where their alternators are syncronised to the grid, turning at grid frequency but with little or no power input. The boilers of spinning reserve fossil fired stations are kept hot but with little energy flow. There is not much wasted energy - despite some crazy theories here about dumping electricity to resistor banks and even light bulbs, ffs!!!! Spinning reserve stations can be brought on-line in minutes.
Other stations are shut down but at standby, with levels of notice required to join the grid typically hours (but days for a nuclear). Hydro stations however can start and stop generating like at the turn of a tap.
The GP's last paragraph was perfectly logical. Currently electricity is sold cheap at night (to local distributors, factories, railways and some end consumers) because of the otherwise wasted capital and attendance costs of the spinning reserve, not because much fuel is being wasted. However if there were greater demand for night electricity, the price of night electricty (and I believe the GP meant night electricity) would go up with market forces.
Like the grocer might sell stale bread cheaper than fresh. But if there were suddenly a big demand for stale bread, because someone had invented a gadget to restore it, he would put its price up (even if not as much as fresh bread) believe me.
I am a (nuclear) power station engineer btw.
Boss, can't make it in to work today. Yea, we lost power last night during the storm. The whole block was out for a good 3-4 hours. I only have a 20% charge on my car. The whole block is charging right now and we're getting an occasional brown out. Needless to say, I won't be charged until this afternoon.
In Colorado, Xcel just changed their rates. If you use more than 500kwh a month, your rate doubles.
In their defense, it was a government panel that insisted on the rate hike. And when Xcel came back with their proposal, the panel said that it could be increased even further.
Not only is this bad for any business, but now it looks like it's bad for the spread of electric cars.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Everything you say is true. What is also true is that most families have more than one car. Keep the ICE minivan for when it's your turn to take the soccer team to the game. Drive your EV to and from work.
That said, what fuel we use to power transportation is an economic problem, and as such it will never be resolved and will always be changing. Gasoline prices aren't going to stay at $3/gallon, and at some point it just doesn't make sense to drive the truck to work. We're not there yet, but the question is whether we'll have the tech to adopt to $8/gallon gas when it arrives, or whether we'll be scrambling to adapt after the fact.
In the long term, it'll work out ok either way. In the short term, it'll be better for everyone if we have alternatives - and at $3/gallon that means subsidizing new industries.
What's really, really, really good for the utilities, is that it may become possible to tell your car, "I'm not going to use you for the weekend, so if you want to sell 20% of the power stored in your batteries to the utility, go ahead."
Then if the heat wave peaks on Saturday afternoon, the power company doesn't have to spool up as much peak generating capacity, and you get a credit on your electric bill.
Plug-in-electrics aren't a panacea, but there's a lot of good things about them.
Don't mess with our tidal bulge, it stabilises the orbit of the moon ;)
Actually, the difference in tides in the Atlantic and Pacific contributes to the lag in the tides, which is what causes tidal damping, and is ultimately the cause of the moon receeding from the Earth.
If we implement this scheme, it will delay the departure of the moon!
In five or ten billion years, that may be important :)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
It's fearmongering.
People will move to electric over time. The grid will also be upgraded during that time.
If we all switched to electric tomorrow? sure, but that's not practical. Even if you create an electric car that charged in 30 seconds, went 1000 miles, and gave you a +2 to your charisma it would still take 20 years for a complete transition.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My objection to CFLs is that they grow dark over their lifespan. They don't usually completely die early (although that has happened to me as well) but their light output decreases to the point you can't read with them. The old fluorescent tubes in ceiling fixtures were long enough that you didn't notice them aging as much, but the CFLs have a real problem with this. Savings and ROI aren't material if they don't stay functional over the advertised life span.
I've sworn off CFLs for good. I'll be happy to try LEDs when they get them down to a reasonable price range for the fixtures I have, but until then I'll stay with incandescent lights (and if LEDs don't pick up the pace soon I'll be laying in a big supply).
Reading the article it seems they are talking short term. However those that say it will cause a problem are looking long term with mass conversion which is like the worry of Prius bubbles but nationwide.
Further the 2kW load does not say for how long. Is that for 2 hours or 8?
I think an electric car would be nice IF they are efficient and cost effective. Given the extreme bias toward anything claiming to be green I wonder though. Further what about drives longer than 25 miles? Taking a two hour drive north might mean stopping for 4 to recharge. Or what about trucks and RVs? The solution and thought pattern seems very city centric with all the country people having magic happen.
If every household had four plasma TVs all going at once, you bet your sweet ass it would strain the grid. If electric cars become as ubiquitous as gasoline-powered cars, it WILL strain the grid. Residential power consumption averages about 1KW already. Another 2kW load for several hours is going to make a big difference. (And the US has close to 2 cars per household). Forget about off-peak; the electric cars create their own peak.
The analysis in this report is based on not many people buying electric cars... yeah, while they remain a niche item, there's no problem. But they're also not very interesting as a systemic replacement for petroleum-powered cars if they remain a niche item.
Five plasma TVs? Time to put a stiff tax on electric cars; look at all the carbon they're adding to the atmosphere!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Tons of people have at least 2 vehicles. And for those that have more, they'll probably be trickle charging 24/7 if they have one that isn't used as much. Even at the figure they stated, that's at least 10-15 plasmas running all night long. That's a HUGE energy load there.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Just require every recharging station to maintain charge on a bank of high-capacity capacitors. Not only will it make it easier to rapidly charge the cars but also maintain the ability of Hollywood to have something dramatically explode in place of gas pumps.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Finally, if the feds were REALLY sincere about getting us off oil/gas, then all they would have to do is change the electrical subsidies. Right now, we subsidize Oil, Coal, and Nukes heavily, with some light subsidies for AE. If we drop all that and simply change to subsidies for
, then we would see loads of new electrical generation, wind, geo-thermal, nukes, AND new forms of storage, in particular, parked cars being used to get energy back. The latter is not that great for batteries, but it is IDEAL for ultra-caps.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... I bought one of these, and based on watching my loads over time, 2 kilowatts is no big deal at all. My dryer uses way more power than that. In fact, an electric toaster uses over a kilowatt. So not only could you charge an electric SUV, you could charge an electric freaking train and still have enough capacity to spare.
On Saturday I went 97.3 miles, AFTER I filled up my tank some time around 11am. Had a few errands to run... mostly grocery shopping, since I hit up one (1) farmer's market and one (1) specialty shop. Saturday was special; I detoured to Whole Foods for an attempt at finding black pudding (no such luck), so extra 10 miles over my usual trip.
There is no way I'd have enough juice to make 100 miles in a day on a 2kW charger. If I worked as reasonably close as just south of the city (a 20 mile drive), I'd never have the 16 hours a day to keep a 40 mile charge going, given the hour-in-traffic ride there and back. It'd be like having a 3 gallon fuel tank; or a 12 gallon fuel tank, but you can only put fuel in at a rate of 1/8 gallon per hour.
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There are a bunch of costs besides the labor - you'd have to acquire the land, which is going to be extremely expensive because it's by definition on the waterfront. Then you'd need a bunch of capital equipment, engineering services, environmental studies, etc, etc. You'd also have to figure out what to do with the dirt you dug up, which is a harder problem than it sounds like - it costs money to move it somewhere, and you can't (generally) just dump it at sea.
While I'm a hundred percent in favor of having the government just put people to work on useful projects like this, this particular one really isn't cheap.
...and the situation seemed more worrisome than this article suggests. I assumed that, eventually, people will shift to all-electric vehicles as opposed to hybrids. Below are the numbers I used. Did I flub the math? Because these calculations sure seem to suggest an electricity crunch as we move off petroleum:
Total miles driven in the U.S. yearly: 3x10^12 mi
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/us-vehicle-mile.html
Electricity use per mile for a fully electric car: 0.17 to 0.37 kWh/mi (mean: 0.27)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Energy_efficiency
Total electricity needed to support all miles driven by fully-electric vehicles: 3x10^12 mi * 0.27 kWh/mi = 8.1x10^11 kWh
Total yearly electricity production of the U.S. (2007): 4.157x10^9 kWh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_generation
In other words, if we assume that hybrid/electric vehicles currently account for an insignificant portion of total miles driven, and we were to covert all vehicles to be fully electric, U.S. electricity production would have to increase by a factor of 194 in order to support the additional load.
And yes, it's a real problem. But in this particular case, it's likely that improved soldering alloys are going to solve this problem without needing to go back to lead. There's already been quite a lot of progress in this area.
If the article is correct in that 2 kilowatts is the power draw from these things, I can't believe there's an issue. Your house is already full of devices drawing more power than that - starting with your dryer. The other day I was running the washer, dryer, dishwasher, some lights, and the a/c was running - I was pulling down like 8 kw (as measured by my whole-house power meter). A 2 kw load at night won't faze your distro system.
One is distribution, and I can pretty much promise that there's no issue there. If it's correct that 2 kw is the charging load, your existing home distro system can handle that with ease, even during the day, and these should normally be charged at night.
The other is new electricity demand, and yes, these systems will cause an increase in total electrical demand. But that's the point - we want to substitute efficiently generated and transmitted electricity for dirtier ICE engines. That means we'll need new (clean) electrical sources, whether those be nuclear, solar, wind, or whatever. But at any reasonable rate of uptake, we should be capable of bringing new capacity online in plenty of time.
Turn on your dryer... you're almost certainly burning over 2 kw. Oh, you also have your lights on? And the TV? And the air conditioning is running? You can be pulling 8 or 10 kw really easily. I agree that this is kind of a dumb comparison (I think plasma TVs just became the new Slashdot unit for power, alongside Libraries of Congress for data), but in terms of pure numbers... your home electricity distro system won't melt down from plugging one of these in.
The article, in its clumsy way, is trying to point out that the electrical distribution system can handle an added 2 kw load per house. Power generation is a different issue - massive adoption of electric vehicles will require additional generation capacity. But that's the point - we want to substitute relatively clean (and oh, by the way, cheaper) electricity for dirty, more expensive (and oh, by the way, imported from the middle east or drilled off the coast of Louisiana) petroleum products. Using more clean electricity and less gas is a GOOD thing.
I can't believe you don't understand these units - a plasma television worth of electricity is equivalent to 1.7 Olympic swimming pools... full of electrons... or something.
Or for business, power purchase agreements. Since local generation is typically net-metered, that means your solar PV plant is sold back at the higher rate first (assuming you're using more than 500 kwh)... and pays back faster.
I'm not sure I entirely agree. We've got oil-sands up here. And my grandather's always complaining that people in his building warm up the sauna for 30 minutes before getting in. It's electric, and in 30 minutes it consumes more everything to warm up the sauna than the single drop of gasoline which would be required to do the same thing. And besides, whether it's oil or hydrogen or the next mystery fuel, fuel is often betten than electricity for storage and transport -- which is exactly what your car needs to do with it.
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
The kind of car we're talking about is like a Mazda Leaf, which has an engine rated at 80 kw. Of course, it's not going to be running at it's rated capacity for for very long - I'm thinking that over the course of a commute, it's going to average more like 10 kw (I think your estimate of a 45 kw average for your car is almost certainly high, btw, and this car has a lot of energy conservation features like regenerative braking that yours does not). Nissan estimates that the battery could be fully charged in in 8 hours (with the 220 v connector). If your round trip commute is 1.5 hours (90 miles, which something like 90% of all Americans fall under), you'd burn 1.5 hours * 10 kw = 15 kwh. At a charging rate of 2 kw, that's easily do-able in 8 hours.
Bottom line: of course YOUR car couldn't take on enough electricity at 2 kw to perform adequately. These cars are not like yours.
Daytime residential loads run around 2.5 kw sustained (or higher, depending on the season and where you live), with much higher peaks when you do things like run the dryer. I guarantee that the power distro system is capable of handling a bunch of extra 2kw night-time loads (when the typical house is running in the hundreds of watts range). Not only that, but the advent of smart metering will allow cars to serve as an emergency temporary SOURCE of power during peak load times - they actually help STABILIZE the grid. Will we require additional GENERATION capability? Almost certainly. But it's not like everyone is going to be replacing their gas-fired car tomorrow - we have years to get ready for this. And if part of "getting ready" includes promotion of home solar systems, then you solve a bunch of problems all at once.
This is essentially a hydroelectric station, so power generation is limited by hydraulic head and flow rate. Tides in most parts of the world tend to have not much of either.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think the people that believe 16 Kilowatt hours of energy is enough to let them drive to work and back are going to be a little bit disappointed. (Unless they live within 5 miles of their work)
--fatboy
Isn't this how markets are supposed to work? Sounds like Germany has a good thing going.
One thing that most people miss is also the ability to sell electricity back during peak hours, that would compensate the added draw in charging. When you have car standing in garage with 100% battery then during peak it could sell 20-30% of the capacity and charge again once rates go lower making driving on electricity even cheaper. Smart grid will enable this sort of behavior, but until people get energy storage/production at home smart grid is not a priority.
It's not reasonable to dismiss the two-seater if the price difference is greater than the odd taxi fare. Similarly, it's not reasonable to dismiss a car with X range simply because 1/500th of your travels are longer.
This applies to everything - engine size, etc. People buy based on emotion and "could I ever need this?", not "is this worth it for my use?".
The idea that the grid won't be overloaded is probably true, since most cars will charge overnight. Off-shift workers will be charging during the day, but I'd still tend to think this part is true. Of course, given the continued destruction of our economy and movement of jobs off-shore we may not have to worry too much about such things.
... oil.
My real concern is more along the lines of efficiency. How much power do we push into the cars vs what we get out? And once we have a larger population charging we'll be drawing more than the "minimum" generated power. That power is provided increasingly by
Now, if we made the leap to nuclear (the only currently viable large scale power production technology) to provide electricity until we can really get the alternatives (or something entirely new) providing power, I'd be more inclined to think we're making progress.
After all, what's the point in moving the burning of fossil fuels from our cars to some remote power plant and then potentially losing energy in the conversion process in and out of the car batteries?
'Round here, Xcel is forward-thinking enough about electric cars to make sure to buy off the Public Utilities Commission early on in this shift to more people using them, and get a massive change in how their rates are structured in a nice "tiered" system that will bend anyone plugging in a car at night, over and rape them repeatedly for great profit. They're not stupid. And they're hiding it under the banner of "motivation to conserve" today. Now all they have to do is wait for the slow progress on electric car technology to speed up (or buy off some more politicians in the House and Senate to vote for *required* numbers of electric cars produced) and they'll laugh all the way to the bank.
+++OK ATH
I'm not going to look through 428 comments to see if this is already addressed, so I'll just put it in simple numbers for you all: A very streamlined car going about 60 mph uses about 50 kilowatts. Thus, the 2 kW charge rate mentioned above would move such a car only about 2.4 minutes for each hour of charging. If you could change all the cars in the US to electric propulsion, you'd need 200 to 250 additional nuclear reactors to provide the energy for them. Wind or solar power won't get you there since it would require about 5,000 one-MW wind turbines or about 20 million square meters of solar collectors to equal the daily energy production of just one reactor. And that's not even the hard part of the problem with wind or solar, which is storage and transmission. The grid is already stressed to the breaking point with brownouts and breakdowns a daily occurence in summer. How could adding a few million electric cars not make a difference? Next time check with an engineer. And if you are an engineer, go back to school. The ONLY way to avoid serious shortages in the future is to go nuclear for our primary energy needs, and electric for our cars. And I do mean the ONLY way.
Synchronizing stop lights across the US = one less nuclear power plant