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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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Really? Is that how you use your car right now?
You don't go to lunch?
Go out for dinner?
Run to the corner store for groceries?
Any number of other errands or other trips?
And how many of these trips do you plan far enough in advance to also plan and schedule your car to be charged?
More likely: drive to work for 9 am, park, plugin car and charge [along with everybody else] just so you can get home in it
-oops, going out for lunch, need to charge car again
-drive home
-start charging car right away, because you might decide to go out for dinner or do any number of errands that evening
-do errand and charge car again
Repeat EVERY DAY.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
What a great idea. And they could market it under a clever name like "time-of-use"or something equally catchy.
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?
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...
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...
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.
A constant mid-high usage is basically the best case scenario for a power grid. This is especially true where nuclear power plants and other electricity producers can't actually be scaled back during low-load situations.
The ______ Agenda
Tesla range: 160-250 miles (depending on options)
Subaru G4e range*: 125 miles
Mini Electric: 100 miles
Chevy volt: 40 miles
Coda Sedan: 90 miles
Nissan Leaf: 100 miles
*vehicle has not hit production yet
The ______ Agenda
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
...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
And then the fact that you have to replace a major and expensive component of your vehicle (batteries) every 3-5 years.
Where are you pulling that figure from?
I doubt the battery lifespan is going to be that short when the Chevy Volt (for example) is coming with a 150,000 miles/10 year warranty, and Nissan seems likely to follow suite with the Leaf.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
He's giving LED more time to catch up to CF in initial investment price because of the HAZMAT issues with CF bulbs....
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.
... 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.
...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.
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