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."

Comments

What if...

[Mitchell314]

...most people buy electric SUV's? Didn't think that one through, did they? :P

This sort of thing can only be good for wind/solar

[Entropius]

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.

Sure..

[Mr0bvious]

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.

No problem, long as they charge at night

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:No problem, long as they charge at night

[hairyfeet]

I think the bigger question, which I didn't see answered in TFA, is whether these things are truly better than ICE vehicles on the environment. I mean sure we know they'll probably be better than a Hummer, but has anyone figured out what the mining of lithium for the batteries, the toxic components used in such batteries, the amount of carbon put out in production, the amount used by the grid (many places still have coal plants you know) and finally the disposal and replacement of those batteries after 3-5 years, how all of that compares say to a Kia or other small 4 cyl ICE vehicle?

Because as we saw with the "get rid of teh evil lead solder!" stupidity we can often make things worse instead of better by not thinking things through. in the case of solder we ended up with a lot more e-waste because the crap solder they replaced lead with broke down much faster than the old, and thrown into a burn pit in China frankly isn't any better than the old. So I would like to see what a "birth to death" study of elec VS ICE would show before I say that elec is the way to go. After all it won't be doing us much good if we just trade carbon at the tailpipe for carbon at the plant PLUS piles of dead batteries PLUS lots of waste in mining and disposal. We need to look at the entire cycle before judging one tech or another.

Re:No problem, long as they charge at night

[nbahi15]

Removing lead is progress and in time the restriction will become a non-issue for even those that believe in the goodness of lead.

In the US, people spent ages bellyaching about the low-flush toilets. Initially the toilets that came out often did perform poorly because when you could use half a lake to flush the toilet you didn't need good design. Designs have improved and one of the greatest wasters of fresh water was reduced.

Realize that government is a process and that there are always trade-offs. Usually they aren't even entirely clear trade-offs.

Re:No problem, long as they charge at night

[Rei]

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.... ;)

Re:Is this future tense?

[copponex]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout

Though the term did not enter popular use in the U.S. until the California electricity crisis of the early 2000s, outages had indeed occurred previously. The outages were almost always triggered by unusually hot temperatures during the summer, which causes a surge in demand due to heavy use of air conditioning. However, in 2004, taped conversations of Enron traders became public showing that traders were purposely manipulating the supply of electricity, in order to raise energy prices.

The DoE has stated that most of the Eastern Seaboard could support the energy requirements of every single car used for commuting today, without any changes to transmission or power production, as long as the cars are charged at night.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/doe_study_offpe.html