Slashdot Mirror
First Electric Cars Have Power Industry Worried
Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Fahey writes for AP that as the first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, the power industry faces a huge growth opportunity, with SoCal Edison expecting to be charging 100,000 cars by 2015 and California setting a goal of 1 million electric vehicles by 2020. But utility executives are worried that the difficulty of keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers — and their neighbors — could slow the growth of this industry because it's inevitable that electric utilities will suffer some difficulties early on. 'We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,' says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America. When plugged into a home charging station the first Leafs and Volts will draw 3,300 Watts and take about 8 hours to deliver a full charge, but both carmakers may soon boost that to 6,600 Watts. The Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car with a huge battery, can draw 16,800 Watts. That means that adding an electric vehicle or two to a neighborhood can be like adding another house, and it can stress the equipment that services those houses. The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts so the extra stress on a transformer from one or two electric vehicles could cause it to overheat and fail, knocking out power to the block."
Good! Maybe one the shit blows up they can replace the 50 year old hardware that's been causing brownouts in California since the early 80s.
Worried? Build more capacity then. It's not like your customers have been or will be getting all that electricity for free (or even cheap in some cases).
The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts
often designed to handle 12,000 watts? Hogwash. That's 50 amp service (in North America, where homes are almost always supplied at 240VAC). Most new homes in North America receives at minimum 200 amp service. Even my rural 1956 rancher has 70 amp service.
And this is a single home. Most transformers supply several houses. If there are any transformers rated at 12KW, they are very few and far between, and probably service locations that aren't likely to have electric cars anyhow.
I have 100 amp service. That means I can use 22000 watts, more than enough. Right now, I'm using 3 1500 watt heaters in my house, for a total of 4,500 watts.
Some of my neighbors have 200 amp service. The utility company is not going to put a 12000 watt transformer up to any of our houses...
This could mean that actual jobs would be created in California.
Since I work for a company that primarily builds power plants, I will have steady work for several more years.
Zoning regulations already prohibit heavy industry in residential areas -- this prevents excess stress on local roads, power supplies, water supplies, sewage systems, etc. Seems to me that car chargers shouldn't be approved for residential use unless the power grid can handle them, for the same reason you wouldn't build an aluminum factory in a neighborhood.
Shoulda thought of that several years ago when you started pushing electric cars, and I would blame the car manufacturers and electric stations equally - if you have 100amps into the house, you should be able to pull 100 amps. If you don't, then you need to contact the electricity company who are then suitably forewarned. Also, the car companies never mention just how much power a car pulls (but yet we're told to worry about 40W bulbs being on for five minutes more than usual!) or that it might need specialised equipment to charge.
I worked in an inner-city school a few years back. We blew the street fuse by plugging in a laptop trolley with 16 90W adaptors. Did we blame the laptop manufacturer's? The school electrician? No, we blamed the electricity company for being so stupid that the *specified* maximum current available for our site was nowhere near what blew the street fuse for the ENTIRE street.
Sort it out, like you should have always have sorted it out. And charge people more if they place a burden on your system and make them get specialised lines that cost more. Problem solved (and it'll also keep electric cars in the bin where they should be - what we *really* need from an ecological point of view is a lithium shortage right now).
Time to build more coal electricity factory
I hope it overheats and turns itself off in a controlled way.
... And apparently we are again not ready for it. Electric cars were common decades ago, and the electric service did not collapse. Now we have two large auto manufacturers debuting cars that can be charged at home - even though few people will be able to afford the entire setup right now - and for some reason the power companies are proclaiming that the sky is falling. Hell the power companies have a solid business model right now, as few people are in a position to maintain their lifestyles without the electricity they currently pay for. So the problem for the electric companies then is what, again?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
for long distance travel : think about an electrified track of some sort and automatic guidance That way there's no real limit to the distance and you can recharge batteries as you go.
.
What's needed to be done is installing power generation (preferably runs on top of #97 gasoline) for extra electricity!
Now the equation is balanced, isn't it?
Assuming the cars charge with 220v, this represents 15 amperes, 30 amperes and around 75 amperes. Most houses will have a 15 amp circuit available - probably you have some appliance plugged into it. Not all that many will have an extra 30 amp circuit, and none have a 75 amp circuit anywhere.
As far as the worries of the power companies: if the greens were serious, they would get behind this. Of course, if you want to reduce our usage of oil, we do need a few new power plants. Nuclear would be best, but even if you try to go full-on green, the eco-nuts will oppose them all. Don't bother asking what they would support - most of them apparently think that power magically comes out of the wall-socket, with no need for nasty things like power plants...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Residential charging stations are already covered in the National Electric Code, fwiw (and the Code is considered law, with state/local overrides for specific provisions (with the approval of the AHJ)).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
If not, I suggest you start training right now because the utilities will not be able to keep up with the demand for the installation of home charging stations and, under the NEC, a licensed electrician is an approved person for installing a home charging station. (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Though some want to think this is not so but the fact is, we know how to do extremely low cost (often referred to as free energy) energy production.
This is technology that has been suppressed, which we all know really does happen.
A musician friend of mine noticed how a spring reverb sounds different depending on location. Altitude perhaps but also locations, Canada, Florida, west coast, etc.
So he started messing around with the magnets but not your typical magnets. I forget what type of magnet he called them but I think it was rare earth magnets as they don't wear out and that was something he said regarding the magnet quality. He eventually chopped one in half and oriented the parts in a suspended manner. They started spinning on their own and not a lightweight type of spin for their size.
He told his dad about it and his dad said, they will kill you. His Father had worked many years for a well known electronics company but for the military developing such things as lasers that can punch holes in thick plates of steel, leaving a burnt air path, etc..
Only I don't think my friend was the first to do this with magnets. Seems I came across other mentions of such free energy magnet devices that mysteriously vanished along with their discoverer/inventor.
So what happens if the electric companies can't keep up? Maybe they can be removed to some degree, from the picture.
I've also read not so long ago, where wind generators are causing problems with overloading the power lines during increases in wind. Apparently the power lines are not heavy duty enough to handle it.
In short, there is no problem here, no story to see.
...all of these electric cars will probably be pulling as much or more power than even a big bank of grow lights.
I'm sure that people have already started figuring out ways to shape their energy usage to make it look like they have a new electric car at home, instead of... a shed full of lush, green plants!
coding is life
That's all this is. The electric company powers that be guessed no one would buy electric cars, so why spend the money to upgrade infrastructure. Oops. Time to go explain to the shareholders that you have to spend of money instead of handing out dividends.
The shareholders and the board can fix this by firing the managers, and the next bunch won't make the same mistake.
Problem solved!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Most charging will be done at night, when electricity use (home and business) is otherwise low.
They had plenty of time to invest their profits into upgrading the power grid to anticipate future demand, and didn't. Those short-sighted sons of syphilitic bitches can go fuck themselves with a Saturn V rocket and no lube.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
You can't go by what things are breakered at - that's the maximum the circuits can safely draw. The circuits aren't meant to draw more than 1/2 to 2/3 of that value. Speculation, but I doubt that the electrical service in a neighborhood is designed anywhere close to having all the loads draw their breakered values.
It doesn't surprise me at all that electric companies oversubscribe their service and count on individual homes pulling relatively low loads. It makes sense - that is what causes brownouts and the need for electric companies to drop neighborhoods out so they can keep from overstressing transmission lines and such. If electric companies didn't oversubscribe their service there would not be brownouts.
It's high load in the residential areas that will make it important for people to supplement the grid with local power generation with things like solar panels. The problem there is that the electric vehicles will generally be somewhere else during the day. The efficiency isn't completely lost, though, and solar panels in a neighborhood are generally much closer to the local industrial loads than the power plants.
But this is going to be the kicker to help get people to put up panels. It will be distributed power generation and will help the grid deal with the much higher loads that electric vehicles will impose.
No where in the original article or any of the links is the number 12kW mentioned. At Slashdot, don't assume the article synopsis has anything to do with the actual content. I would assume most modern houses could handle an additional dedicated 220V/20A circuit for the slow charge, but don't underestimate the hassle of plugging in the car every night. Ooops, forgot to plug-in last night, now I can't make it to work this morning.
They don't work. Yours is yet another story where some friend of a friend did something and wow - it ran all by itself without any energy input.
There is no such thing as "free energy". You need to explain why the laws of thermodynamics should all be violated. Let us know when you can do that.
I've already started converting my house to run on gasoline, thus leaving enough electricity for charging my car.
Mostly random stuff.
That sounds just like cloud computing. Centralize all of the most important parts of the system at some remote location, and make extensive use of dumb clients.
With cloud computing you're taking the power to run applications away from individual PCs and transferring it to some remote server farm, while with electric cars you're taking their ability to generate their own energy and transferring it to some remote power generation facility. Cars with their own power generation plants end up becoming "dumb" in that they require their power to be generated elsewhere.
Now, we all know that cloud computing is one of the stupidest ideas to hit computing in a long time. It has generally been a painful disaster for anyone stuck using it. One minor fault along the network and your dumb clients are now totally useless. The cloud provider can hold your data hostage, as well, unless you pay them exorbitant fees. When it comes to electric vehicles, the control over the ability for you to power your vehicle is transferred from yourself and the multitude of petrol providers you can choose from, to a single power utility that you have little to no control over.
So now not only will our computers not work well, since they're using cloud-based "applications", but our vehicles won't work well since they're using a similar approach, too? That's not something to look forward to.
Just out of interest, WTF are you supposed to plug the Tesla Roadster into for recharging?
"MAINS DISTRO - PLEASE PARK HERE" - like, this cannot be feasible for anyone on a single phase supply, surely?
Many of the type of folks who would buy an electric car at this early stage are the same type of folks who will also add solar or wind power to their home so that they can generate their own "gas".
My solar panels cover my electrical usage pretty much 100% to charge my Tesla Roadster, along with the rest of my house. Power Utility optional (but nice to have as a back up). System more than pays for itself when charging an electric car and preventing brownouts from popping my computers and electrical equipment.
Many of the other Tesla owners I know have added solar to their houses, as did many of the EV1 owners and original RAV4EV owners. I expect a large percentage of Volt and Leaf owners will do this as well.
The power industry needs to pay attention to what ISPs are doing to solve similar problems.
1.) Spend upgrade money on creating new classes of service, rather than worrying about upgrading low profit transformers. The electricity for your lights, which you need right away, should be tagged differently than the electricity for your car, which can wait for delivery. Then, make more money by charging extra for uninterrupted "light electricity."
2.) Spend more money investigating people's power usage, and threatening to shut off everyone who uses an electric car. (The power companies do this already looking for marijuana grow-lights, so this should be cheap to implement.) Couple these "deep power inspection" with blockage measures so that electric cars only get a trickle charge. Cap people's usage so that the power to the "bad actors" gets shutoff when they exceed their cap.
3.) Implement a propaganda campaign castigating electric car users for actually using the electricity that they paid for.
4.) Demand public subsidies to upgrade the power system, and use the resulting money on items # 1 - 3 above.
With these simple measures, both our power system and our broadband Internet delivery can continue to slide to third-world status, and useful employment can be extended to armies of consultants.
The standard solution for high-draw machinery is a separate three-phase service.
Three-phase chargers that convert to DC for fast charging at home would handle the job economically, cut the cost for three phase residential service (more machine tools and welders for me!), and dispose of the "chickenshit residential service" drawback.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I'm not sure how many households will have two Tesla Roadsters charging at the same time...
No sig today...
I know, the thought of putting a small modern gasoline or diesel generator in your basement to generate electricity and provide winter heat - 100% efficient, less the noise energy - is utterly ridiculous. Far greener to charge an electric car from the 40 year old coal plant hidden behind the hill, right?
Crib notes: even in California, fossil plants still accounts for northwards of 80% of electricity generation. Electric cars plus regulation may tip that towards renewables, but make no mistake that the first few generations of electric vehicles are going to be powered by dinosaurs.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
the power grid is metered unlike most ISP unlimited planes you can't just shut off high uses as they pay based on what they use.
It matters little if you get your "fuel" from a plug or a pump, either way you have to pay someone else for it. It has nothing to do with similarities to cloud computing. In fact, with electric vehicles, one day solar power may lesson the costs and allow consumers to make their own fuel.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
First power company executives were gibbering about all the new revenue. Well, part of what we pay in electric rates today is the distribution side so they damn well better start upgrading the transformers and everything else.
Luckily I have 480V going by where I live so that would make charging an electric vehicle much faster.
I've read a lot about electric cars and _electric_ infrastructure, generating capacity, etc. However, I haven't seen a single article addressing the loss of taxes from gasoline. Gas taxes pay for road maintenance. Heck, there were stories awhile back about people who were using biodiesel or waste fryer oil in their cars who had to get some special license or permit to cover the taxes they weren't paying. It's why red diesel fuel is so cheap... only farmers who don't drive on roads can use it.
So... where will the revenue come from after hundreds of thousands of people switch to electric cars or plug-in hybrids? Will there be a tax on electricity? Special metering for rechargers? A general flat-tax added to all electricity prices?
We have excuses for why your electricity bill will be higher next year, new ways to manipulate the stock prices of utility companies, and more reasons why we won't be going green this year. Coming up at 10:00.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
no idea where all the extra electricity is supposed to come from. Burning oil, gas? Just sweeps the problem under the carpet. Also motorists claim all gas taxes should be used on the roads. Well soon there will be no gas tax - so no spending on roads? I'm still waiting for the first so-called Libertarian to propose full privatisation of the road system, so that it is funded solely by those that directly use it. Ain't gonna happen tho' as socialism for Me is fine, socialism for The Others is Bad.
This headline is a century too late is you consider the electric taxis in New York way back then.
From the article you linked:
"Before this week's power outages, California Governor Gray Davis's efforts to secure adequate supplies of electricity appeared to have stabilized the situation, at least until summer. The state is paying $45 million a day to subsidize energy purchases by the state's two major utility companiesSouthern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E).
Recently the governor announced that some long-term contracts have been negotiated in the $70-80 per megawatt range."
The state spending $45 million a day hardly seems like DEregulation to me.
What they call "deregulation" of the power industry in California was actually a change in regulations, not the elimination of regulations. For instance, Wikipedia says:
"The California energy market allowed for energy companies to charge higher prices for electricity produced out-of-state"
"the Death Star group of scams played on the market rules which required the state to pay "congestion fees" to alleviate congestion on major power lines"
"in 2000, wholesale prices were deregulated, but retail prices were regulated for the incumbents as part of a deal with the regulator, allowing the incumbent utilities to recover the cost of assets that would be stranded as a result of greater competition, based on the expectation that "frozen" rates would remain higher than wholesale prices".
"By keeping the consumer price of electricity artificially low, the California government discouraged citizens from practicing conservation. In February 2001, California governor Gray Davis stated, "Believe me, if I wanted to raise rates I could have solved this problem in 20 minutes."
That's over-regulation, not deregulation. Deregulation would be letting anyone produce, transmit, and sell electricity at any price the consumers would pay.
'We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,' says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America.
That's a logical fallacy. No cookie for you, Mark Perry.
The average intelligence today is exactly the same as it was back when intelligence tests were first made.
Wait a few years when the batteries start to die (they don't last forever) and folks begin to notice they can replace the car (with a gas model) for less than the price of new batteries.
Oh boo hoo! Our buisness is booming and we'll be doubling our revenue! Whatever shall we do? How will we manage? What crazy buisness school is turning out managers who think massive growth is bad? Why don't ISP's want to sell more bandwidth instead of throttling us? Why would power sellers not want to sell more electricity? When you sell a metered comodity you should WANT to increase sales as that boosts your income and justifies performance bonuses.
So I take it that V2G is bullshit? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_to_grid
www.itjerk.com
I'm soooooo worried that people might have to give us more money and use more electricity.
The lead-acid battery GM EV-1 was supposed to get 100 miles on a 10 kWHr charge (yeah, yeah, YMMV). The folks I knew "in the business" of EV's at the time considered 10 kWHr as a rough equivalent to a gallon of gas and told people that that EV-1 was essentially a 100 MPG car from an energy consumption perspective. The EV-1 would get 300 eMPG on the new EPA rating.
By this reckoning, the Tesla Roadster is 50 MPG and the LEAF and Volt are in the mid 30's. Heck, I used to drive a Toyolet (GM-Toyota joint venture car) that got in the low 30's in town and mid 40's on the road.
Besides, I thought everything equal, the electric car was supposed to cut out the energy drain of idling the gas engine and regen braking was supposed to recapture energy lost in stopping. Why are the new cars such energy hogs? Is it a cost/benefit relation that making another true 100 eMPG car like the EV1 requires more efficient and expensive motors and motor controllers?
Heavy power usage at off peak times is one of the best signs somebody is running a grow-op in their basement. I wonder if your heavy power usage at night will bring a friendly visit by black clad ATF members with sledgehammers and automatic weapons?
My rights don't need management.
While individual houses may be designed to handle up to 200 amps, do you really think the distribution system is designed to handle every house drawing their maximum possible (200 amp) load all at the same time?
So go eat some hogwash yourself...
The real problem is that utility executives are lemmings that all want to run off the same cliff at the same time. SCE happens to think they are the leader in providing to the electric car industry, and they have been keeping their heads down in the California battles lately. PG&E has had several messes on their hands between that proposition in June and San Ramon, and since CA is likely to lead in adoption, it is a CA utility that the rest of the industry will look to and so SCE gets it by default.
SCE has been wringing their hands for years and posturing themselves to the electric car and plug in hybrid as an excuse to demand distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get for years. That is what the other utility executives see. They see hand-wringing that can posture for distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get through their utility commissions for years due to opposition to increasing rates. Utility rates are worse than even the usual political sausage factory. Maybe the consumer groups and enviros will go for the rate increases if packaged with the plug in car. That is the whole reason for all the utility company angst. It is manufactured for the theater of public, and public utility commission, opinion.
The manufactured angst is their current cliff, just like downsizing was in the 90's.
In their defense, maybe they are right. Maybe they really haven't had the money in the distribution accounts to pay for upgrades. I know more than 99.995% of the people out there about power rates in general, but that still leaves at least the 1000 or so people spread throughout the IOUs that actually understand their own individual rates and how they affect their accounts down to the GL. You would go insane if you actually tried to understand that from the outside rather than just understand how it affects your house or facility.
To a couple of other points.
1) The power distribution, and transmission, equipment installed thirty to sixty years ago was so preposterously overengineered at the time that it is still cranking along nicely. In the words of my primary high voltage expert "a cool transformer is a happy transformer". By and large they can sit there well past the apex of the failure curve and keep going indefinitely. The stuff that is in the air and on the ground is by and large fine until it fails, and easy to replace when it does. All of the handwringing about the smart grid is also largely a bunch of BS. The grid is a lot smarter than you would know from the outside. The problem is and was broken regulation. The way utilities used to make money was they built new generation to serve new load. Transmission only existed to get the hostage generation to the hostage load. The transmission system was not previously regulated in such a way that would lead to what America has needed for years, which is the super-highway concept of high voltage lines that would allow markets to properly function. It really isn't even regulated properly now.
2) Continuing the theme, deregulation was not the problem in California. A deregulated electricity market looks nothing like a deregulated market for most other commodities. A deregulated market for electricity exists in multiple and overlapping frameworks of regulation. The problem in CA was the regulated model they selected for their deregulated market. They took the mostly functional British model and applied it to California. What they did not understand was that in Britain there was a) a massive oversupply and b) a utility industry that was so broken that the utilities had a built in ability for utilities to do things like "install meters" and make money. Since California is in a net import situation, and had meters, the market conditions had nothing to do with their model. The proximate cause of the so called "energy crisis" also was actually physical. It was the explosion on the El Paso pipeline in 2000 that jacked up prices and limited supply in CA even ahead of the general massive NG spike. Those two fact
Where is ENRON when you need them?!
The problem they're talking about is energy distribution, not generation.
That's absolutely correct. However, since people will tend to charge their cars at off-peak hours, you'd think that the distrubution issues are less than they are making out. Sure, it's like adding hundreds of additional houses, but most of those "houses" are going to be charging at a time when all the lights and appliances are off in the real houses because everyone is asleep.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Make no mistake, folks, a new level of tiered service will be coming. Utility companies will find a way to stick it to you because of your abnormally high demand just as the ISPs want to be able to charge you more for serving up craploads of cat videos and bittorrents. Hell, they already want to put smart meters and smart thermostats to give them more control over your life. Don't think that they won't find a way to tell you "Oh, well, you need a higher level of service for which we are going to charge you to install new wiring and charge you a higher rate because you're plugging your car into the grid." They already charge you a higher basic rate if you get 3-phase power installed in your house regardless of how many kWh you use.
Is it a cost/benefit relation that making another true 100 eMPG car like the EV1 requires more efficient and expensive motors and motor controllers?
The EV1 used NiMH battery tech which was sold by GM to Texaco which is now owned by Chevron, and they will not license it to anyone. It is the key to making affordable EVs with a decent range until the new Lithium techs (like batteries with carbon nanowires) become readily available. GM didn't want to make EVs because like the other two "Big Three" automakers of the USA, they depend on service revenues to stay afloat. This led them to develop a series of shitpiles in the 70s and 80s. The Japanese responded by building superior automobiles and operating on a superior business model where they turned our crushed cars into their new cars and sold them back to us at a profit even after import tariffs.
GM killed the electric car by lobbying against California's upcoming emissions standards and by selling its battery technology to another party with an interest in preventing EVs from making a foothold so that they would be legally unable to repeat their feat. Nissan has brought it back by being willing to have vision. A Japanese automaker can get away with building a car which will require less service revenue because their business model does not depend on them to the same degree. Reviews of the Nissan LEAF have been universally positive with the only complaints being uninspired steering (A typical trait of relatively heavy vehicles) and poor rear visibility, which is mitigated by a rear-facing camera on the nicer trim package. Mitsubishi will follow shortly.
Can the big three follow suit? Can the USA afford to be the only nation in the world not embracing alternative energy? Will we be able to breathe in a future where energy production continues to be dominated by big oil?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If adding 2 cars to a home block is like adding 2 more houses how much is it going to take to "FillUp" ? Family's use electricity like its water with well over 100.00 elect bills. Are we talking city blocks? Town blocks?
Jack of all trades,master of none
Electric cars are built in vain, most electricity comes from coal power, require oil powered vehicles to mine the copper, lithium and other chemicals which once disposed of are more toxic to the environment than the exhaust from the latest combustion engines. Not only that but electricity rates will have to go up as the margins of electric companies need to rise to keep up with infrastructure costs which will offset any cost savings from electric cars (which there wasn't any to begin with since batteries have to be replaced and the cars cost more.) The lower oil consumption will make gasoline even more feasible to consumers, Jevon's Law (assuming electric cars ever took off even minorly.) The electric car never took off for a reason, and it wasn't because of the evil oil companies, it's because the idea is currently impracticable and no well wishing subsidies can change that. Natural gas, hydrogen cars and mass transit are what's going to be the future of transportation, in my opinion.
And local (small plant) generation is the solution.
But, heaven forbid that the power companies might have customers who generate their own energy right?
Here's a clue to the hapless power companies: ever heard of renting equipment to end users?
Sure, the cost of the equipment is large (solar or wind), but not when you consider capitalization on that equipment. Rent out a windmill to a user and get it paid off a couple two or three times over its life. But wait, won't users just buy their own equipment? Maybe, but probably not. Consider support of the equipment: the power company stands behind it right?
I'd say the solution to this problem is just one that is uncomfortable for the power companies who are resistant to change. Big surprise.
I'd happily pay you Tuesday for a biopsy today!
Do those of you that think you can draw 200 amps from your residential electric service also think that your car can go the highest speed that's printed on the speedometer?
new letter/phrase: hex-u means "www"
I see this place is full of cornucopians. I'll get back to you in twenty years to see how this is all working out for you fools. Get some land, learn to grow your own food, and get yourself a bicycle and some horses, you'll see. Technology will cause your extinction.
on winter mornings when BMWs put extra charge in their vehicules
From TFW:
"Before the 1920s, electric automobiles were competing with petroleum-fueled cars for urban use of a quality service car."
"In 1897, electric vehicles found their first commercial application in the U.S. as a fleet of electrical New York City taxis"
So adding a house to a neighborhood is the end of the world? That's effectively what they are saying. Where was all the whining and wailing when there was a massive upswing in new house construction? Odds are most towns will be lucky in the early days if they have one electric car. Most large cities will have in the hundreds. So in most large cities if you added a few hundred houses you'd collapse the electric grid? As others have pointed out most of the charging will be on off peak hours so even if the numbers are 10X higher it'll have no affect on the capacity. Add solar cells to 1% of the houses and you offset the first 5 or 10 years of electric car production. Add solar cells to 10% of the houses and you'll probably offset the next 25 years of solar car production and that's assuming they are a massive success which most of the naysayers are saying they won't be. The numbers all seem reasonable. Some are trying to scare people by saying it'll double your electric bill which is untrue. Any increases will be more than offset by the savings from not having to buy expensive gasoline. When those claims fail they always resort to the black out scenario. If everyone bought a Tesla in the next 5 years then we'd have a massive problem upgrading but unless everyone in the country wins the lottery in the next 5 years I wouldn't worry too much about that one.
People (especially here in California) love to use energy, but they do everything they can to oppose new power generation plants or power transmission infrastructure.
WAY down consumption. I'm currently researching extremely low electric usage households. you could even charge an Aptera electric car at 120v/15A over long periods if batteries and solar panels become more efficient. the aptera's 123 battery pack is 20kwh. Imagine a home that has a 60kwh battery pack. If we all start to look at this as each individual having an off-grid home, our own electric needs can one day be powered by our roof and not a centralized utility station.
http://www.solarpaneltalk.com/showthread.php?2836-Solar-Panels-and-batteries-that-could-recharge-an-Aptera
for the building codes to be updated to mandate solar panels on all new housing construction. Something that is overdue IMHO.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
This is one of the reasons I find his business model so compelling - he and his team has this all thought out. Try not to hate him if you've had bad experiences with SAP. But, to get back to Better Place, they claim they have software that communicates with the cars that have their leased batteries and with the grid to prioritize who gets how much power and when and who can feed power back to the grid when necessary. In effect, it's a distributed energy storage system based on the premise that the vast majority of cars will be stationary and plugged-in for 20+ hours per day.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
In fact it's so obvious that as I read the summary aloud to my wife, who was across the room, my 10 year old blurted it out. "Dad, the answer is Solar Power."
If my 10 year old can figure it out that means these energy executives have as well. The *real* problem is that it doesn't make them any money to recommend, or push for, decentralized power generation. Especially when it's decentralized right down to home generation.
Cry me a river energy corporations and start buying into companies that make solar panels or other alternative power generation gear.
Strangely enough, this means that the electric car business is guaranteed to succeed. Great change happens when one part of society can seize a huge advantage from the other parts. In this case, the wealthy will be able to buy vehicles that will be subsidized by the poor. These new vehicles are more expensive even after federal subsidies, relegating them to the affluent. These people tend to congregate and have the most influence with industry. Their neighborhoods will get upgraded first to handle the new power requirements. The cost of the upgrades will be spread across the utility's base, mostly poor. As demand increases, utilities will raise rates across the board, collecting most of the increase from the poorer customers.
It is not a pure "rich steal from poor" play (e.g., Wall Street), but a good one - "rich get subsidizes by poor." These almost always work. My point - buy Tesla.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your argument fails at one epic point: we have been getting our electric power from centralized stations for over a hundred years.
It's not the first electric car, unless they are talking about this http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarselectrica.htm or one of these http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarselectric2a.htm. I believe that GM made a car at one point that few were on the road that were electric back in the 1990 called the EV1. Why is this called the 'first' instead of the return of electric cars.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Require every electric car to have a larger electric storage capacity, or slower charge time (15A or less). With a larger capacity, it can probably be charged during off-peak hours. With a slower charge time, it doesn't present as much of a burden on the electric grid. Neither of these is what customers want, but if the alternative is higher costs than people would think twice.
I wouldnt go "HURRR STUPID ELECTRIC COMPANIES WHO ARE GREEDY" just yet.
SoCal edison has been hitting up my college and a few others for internships in IT and in engineering.
Apparently they have plans to do some massive upgrading soon.
Also, the Chino Substation off of 12th and Edison is doing some upgrades, they're upgrading one of the paths that comes in from the desert for the new turbine farm in the Tehachapi pass.
I wouldnt say they're not doing anything, more like they're trying to upgrade.
Fun part about the upgrade, the yuppies around the substation and the people living around the path are screaming "NOT IN MY BACK YARD" despite all they're doing is taking down existing towers and replacing them with taller towers with wider bases. The concern is "THESE THINGS WILL COLLAPSE AND DEVALUE MY HOUSE" when you see much taller ones up on top of the hills to the south of Chino Hills and the mountains further south that withstand MUCH more powerful winds than anything that goes through that area.
Yet progress has halted in the last month because of these same people, who will likely go and buy these electric cars as well. Then bitch when their power goes out. They'll also bitch about nuclear power plants being built far away from them as well.
There are plenty of dead zones in the desert that would be great for nuclear power plants and solar arrays that get panned because of a fictitious environmental concern. Some sand flea could be endangered!
So they oversell electric capacity just like they oversell bandwidth?
Yes. Someone long ago found that it's not really necessary to have capacity to handle all possible requests at once, because not everybody uses the system at once.
That's why you and everybody else is able to afford to have a telephone. You would be surprised to find how much it costs to have available at all times the maximum capacity you bought.
When the statistics of the system change, you need new formulas to calculate both the needed capacity and the prices the service will cost. This will happen with the power utilities when electric cars become popular, just as it happened with the phone service when people started buying their first 2400bps modems a quarter of a century ago to access CompuServe.
This looks like a bunch of marketing to lay groundwork to increase prices.
.. say .. solar panels?
To wit: I think of the energy usage like a river.
During the day, "everyone" is at work, and should they turn things off, the usage will remain normal. i.e. The river flow will be relatively the same.
Additionally, once they get to work they'll plug into the work power, which will increase over normal high usage, but will affect large businesses which will only require centralized modifications to the power grid. i.e. river flow here will be huge, and the riverbed will need to be maintained unless it wash away (cause brownouts).
After everyone gets home, the evening river rises in flow to its regular peak. The power grid accepts this quite handily for a couple hours before people go to bed.
At night it's a small river, because "everyone" is sleeping, and the majority of energy will not be used. Plugging cars in now will bring this small stream-like flow to the level of when people were already at home, which the power grid has accepted quite readily so far.
Who suffers? Large businesses having to cow-tow to the fringe benefits their employees (rightly) expect.
Why is the power grid worried? Because they can't tell THAT consumer to piss off and use less energy just to save them a dime in renovation costs.
To me, it says that it may just be worth having something to take the edge off the slightly increased peaks during early evening hours
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
I was at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission meeting in Olympia, Washington on the subject of electric vehicle infrastructure last month. None of the utilities represented there expressed any concern about either short term or long term problems caused by electric vehicles. The ramp-up is going to be very slow, permits for charging stations will give them advanced warning on neighborhood clumping, and we'll have decades to build the capacity required as EVs become a significant load on the grid.
The Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt each pull 3.3 kW maximum. Compare that to a hairdryer that pulls about 2 kW or an air conditioner that pulls 2.5 kW.
People who want to worry about this problem like to note that it takes 8 hours to charge a Leaf, but that exaggerates the load. Driving a mile in an EV uses about 320 Wh, wall-to-wheel. Most Americans drive under 40 miles per day, or about 12.8 kWh, so the average charge will be well below half of the maximum charge. It's analogous to a gas car: just because your tank holds 20 gallons doesn't mean you burn 20 gallons every day.
Unlike air conditioners that add to the peak load, EVs can be charged overnight. All of the EVs coming to the market have timers integrated into the charging controls, so it's trivial to plug in when you get home but not charge until later at night.
Building out the required long-term infrastructure will allow us to keep hundreds of billions of dollars per year in our local economies instead of sending those dollars overseas.
Electric cars were common decades ago, and the electric service did not collapse.
There were 34,000 electric cars registered in the US in 1900.
Most were ornate horseless cabs and carriages or utilitarian service vehicles, like a milk truck, and of no use whatever beyond the city limits.
There were about a half million Model Ts on the road in 1916.
By 1929 there were 23 million cars on American roads and the electric was just a memory.
Most cars will use smart chargers and do a majority of their charging overnight, when power usage low and power rates are lower. A 3300 watt charger is about the same a 2 microwaves, I dont see people protesting at walmart saying dont buy any microwaves you will blow the power grid. I dont expect to see more than a 1% increase per year of plug in-able cars. So we there should be time to get ready, put up solar panels on your roof or something.
The power companies are clearly complaining about this now, because they're angling to have the Gov't step in and pay for their infrastructure upgrades. So they can "meet the needs of the new green economy, etc". Whatever, but it'll probably work. The power utilities are probably the only industry that can get away with charging the customer for the ability to sell the customer more product--most other industries require that the producer build infrastructure on spec, and then recoup that cost through sales. You think that when the Gov't does pay for this infrastructure upgrade, it will be restricted to green consumers? No. The utilities will be happy to take that payday and turn around and sell the power delivery to anyone, including polluters, and bitch about Gov't regulation of a private industry, when the Gov't attempts to legislate the delivery back to the original intent--the reason they paid for the infrastructure upgrade in the first place.
Anyways, I digress. Part of the problem of "green" energy production is that two of the favorite methods of generation, wind and solar, do not provide "base load"--neither provide for power generation all of the time, which is a problem since a consumer could want to use power all of the time. Well, one way to "flatten" out the delivery of that power is by storing the power when it's being generated, and pulling out of the storage when it's needed and the wind isn't blowing. Batteries are one form of storage.
What we have here is a group of consumers willing to purchase the most expensive part of the storage system--the battery. If the utilities were smart, they'd take advantage of this volunteerism. Perhaps by simply only charging these batteries only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining; if it takes 8 hrs to charge, but I have it plugged in for 12 hours a day, a smart sensor would opportunistically charge for those first 4 hours. If the wind is blowing during that time, fantastic. If it's not, then when it gets down to the 8 hr min charge time it starts pulling from any available resource. Or, even more aggressively, those car batteries could provide charge back to the grid during periods of unuse. They'd be opportunistically charged until full, and then provide power back to the grid when the wind stops blowing and there are other customers with demand.
The second strategy is a lot less likely to happen, at least at first. Consumers aren't going to be too happy to have a variable amount of available power in their cars at any given moment that they might want to go down to their movie rental store, so it might require some tight time zoning, etc. But I think the first is practical and reasonable--EV car owners would be a receptive demographic to agree to have their car charged only by alternative energy sources, even if that means that it might take a little longer and be a little more unpredictable, within reasonable standards. If the wind blows, on average, 30% of the time, I would be willing to wait around for the 5 hours of wind power out of the average 14 hours that I would have it plugged in.
--
$tar -xvf
Solar could help (if workplace charging becomes commonplace), but the most viable proven solution right now is Nuclear.
Actually nuclear is the only solution. If you actually look at the basics physics of the situation (as has been done in the UK) then the size, in terms of land area, you will require will be massive and will destroy the environment in a different way. So while renewable sources are great they simply cannot provide all the energy we need and, if we want to avoid CO2, that only leaves nuclear power.
So the choices at the moment are: massively reduce our power consumption in a way which will severely impact our quality of life, live with the effects of global warming or go nuclear and accept the risks of possible nuclear contamination until we get fusion to work.
The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices
Excuse me, but that's REgulation, not DEregulation. True deregulation wouldn't allow anyone to manipulate power supplies and prices, that would have been left to the market.
Cheating is intrinsic to regulation, the only scenario with no cheating is the one where there are no rules.
What the leftist politicians do not understand is that regulation NEVER works to protect the common people. Big corporations have big teams of lawyers working full time to find gaps in the regulation. They do not need to break the rules, just to bend them, to make a profit.
You and me, the common people, we have neither the time nor the expertise to do that detailed analysis work, we are unable to bend the regulations as much.
Had a solar installation done recently to prepare. Sure, electricity is cheaper than gasoline, but free beats both. And I'll be helping the grid, rather than hurting it.
Ugh, its the same damn story in every infrastructure heavy industry these days. The ISPs need to upgrade, and suddenly it's 'abusive' to be a heavy user. The power companies need to generate and supply more, and the solution is 'concern', subsidy and rolling blackouts. There was a time when any of these things would have been seen as a positive for the industry, an opportunity to sell more products. Now it seems that anything that costs any capital whatsoever is treated as a negative, whatever the actual result is. What the hell is going on when supposedly profit seeking firms no longer see their own growth as a positive? Wasn't privatization supposed to avoid this kind of crap?
We already have the concept of time-of-use metering. If you're using energy in large enough quantities to charge your car, you'll want the time-of-use discount anyway. It just means you'll connect your car when you get home, and either set a timer for it to charge when the rates are scheduled to drop (for you), or there will be some other control device that gets a signal from your power company when you can turn that load on for the lowest price.
It may be that you'll get this time scheduled in slices that alternate between all the other power customers requesting the same deferred load price on your branch. If you don't get enough slices to get a full charge, you may have to increase the price you're willing to pay the next day or something.
There have been experiments with scheduling air conditioner compressors to start at staggered times to avoid the stall current. The same kind of thing could work here.
Once I can get an electric car, a PV array on my roof gets a lot more interesting. These usually use net metering to use the grid as a (replacement for a) battery. You may not be able to combine that with time-of-use on the same service connection, but you can at least give yourself priority for the power you're generating while you're generating it (it may not be available later for the same price due to grid capacity limits). It won't always be dark when you'd like to charge your car. In a two car household you probably have one that's home most of the time during the day anyway. If they're both electric the one who commutes during most of the daylight hours can drive the car that was home charging (most of) the day before.
The same current capacity problem occured with railway electrification almost a century ago. Many countries in Europe installed 3000 volt DC catenary and couldn't care more. Of course that meant they couldn't feed railway electric traction from the rapidly developing national high-tension grids, furthermore the rather low 3kV DC tension means only two relatively short trains can run per feed segment (i.e. a limit of about 6000 kilowatt power feed per segment).
The weird thing is a hungarian engineer named Kalman Kando invented the use of almost unlimited power, high tension AC catenaries with three-phase locomotive electric engines, even before 3kV DC was installed anywhere in the world. He had AC installed in some italian mountain railways, but other countries couldn't care less. The idea was resurrected by France only in the late 1940s.
Do you know why China ships all bulk goods to Europe via giant container ships? That's because most of Russia's Transsiberian Railway is electrified with 3000 volt DC, so it cannot cope with many long trains a day due to limits on the catenary current. (Double the voltage and you only need 1/4 as much current in the conductor to transmit the same power.) Even though Beijing to Rotterdam on rails would be quick and simple like 1-2-3, the 3kV DC russians simply cannot move enough electric trains to absorb China's industrial output and the use of diesel locomotives would be prohibitively expensive compared to nuclear-based electricity, not to mention problems of refueling in the middle of such vast nowhere...
Nowadays very high-speed electric railways all run on 25kV, 50/60Hz high tension AC, with the trains having three-phase electric motors as per Kando's ingenious idea, but the traditional tracks of many european railways remain a mess with 3kV DC or 16kV semi-AC catenary (the latter is essentially an ugly 16.7Hz AC hack of DC-based designs). Incompatibility and capacity problems mean railways sucks a great deal when competing with maritime and air traffic.
The lead-acid battery GM EV-1 was supposed to get 100 miles on a 10 kWHr charge (yeah, yeah, YMMV).
The EV-1 lead-acid batteries were 16.5kWh and 55-75 miles range according to Wikipedia (0.3-0.22kWh/mile). The 27kWh NiMH battery pack had a similar kWh to miles ratio (75-150 miles range so 0.36-0.18kWh/mile). The Volt does about the same with 10kWh (it doesn't use the full battery capacity to increase longevity) for a 35-50 mile range (.28-.2 kWh/mile).
I have a friend who works at SoCal Edison. He explained that this risk has been a known one for quite some time. SoCal is working on refitting the meters so that they can charge different amounts for energy during different times of the day. If people charge cars at 10PM it won't be a problem, but it will be if they do it at 5pm when they get home from work, they'll be adding to the peak usage that comes from day time air conditioner use. Right now, people who purchase electric cars already have the option to switch their meter over to the modern one so that they can pay the reduced rate for energy usage during off-peak times.
It's really a Chinese conspiracy to pwn our energy infrastructure.
That is what the whole stopping the export of rare earth metals was about. That means RARE EARTH MAGNETS too!!!!
We are better off developing the Paradox-Powered Generator[PPG} using the well established cat+buttered-toast engine.
Hell, with these, you could eliminate the 'charging stations overloading the grid' problem. Eliminate charging altogether!
The PPG could be small enough to go in the trunk, under the hood-whatever, and activated when needed.
Maybe have add on modules[1] for different needs...it could be REVOLUTIONARY!
As an added bonus, this also scales up quite well:
*power your home with a bobcat and toasted hoagie bun
*Power your business with a leopard and a loaf of bread
*get Siegfried & Roy to partner with a bakery to power your factory
[1]A few examples:
*long distance modules that houses several cats, a roll of duct tape, a bread box, and toaster
*performance modules that increase energy output by adding one or more PPG units that use texas toast instead of regular toast
*conservation modules that use small squares of melba toast and kittens
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Bicycle generators!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Aren't http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_car more viable?
Govt must constitute a panel to rewrite US Constitution and Quran
The transformers 'handle less than 12KW'? Glad I live in South Africa, our domestic sub-stations handle MEGA Watts! HeeeHaa.....no more 'Darkest Africa!'
In Soviet Amerika, we call the goons "lawyers".
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Not sure why we have to charge at home, do we gas up at home, so make it illegal to power your car from home, (sort of like when it is illegal to water your lawn during summer drought days) and make the charging stations off the grids totally, letting the power co deal with it, no use bringing down their grids and leaving us all vulnerable, just be smart about it, and set up charging stations, to use special plugins which you force all car vendors to install, (canadian km vs. american miles) it can be done, that way no house will drain the grid, and only charging stations which will be properly built not to over strain the grid will power up the cars.
A too-fast ramp up of electric vehicles could present a serious power problem. I did the math on this, several years ago. At the time, I into account the power used only by passenger cars, compared the relative "well to wheel" efficiencies, and the answer was pretty clear: to replace all gas/diesel consumer vehicles with electric would require a doubling of the US's power output. That's not the kind of thing that's easy to achieve in a generation, much less 10 years or so. This hasn't been a problem due to the very slow growth of electric vehicles. But if they explode into popularity, it could be a huge problem.
Of course, there are various options here. A home charging station with its own local storage (batteries, flywheel, gravity, etc... which is absolutely needed to allow anything but trickle-charging overnight) can be controlled by the power companies to suck power only when it's plentiful, even to provide power back to the grid when there's a potential brownout situation. And of course, moving to an electric vehicle makes the prospect of home solar/wind/hydro much more lucrative, for those who have the room and investment to add this (and in particular, in areas with a grid smart enough to buy excess home-generated power).
-Dave Haynie
Doubling the voltage reduces the current needed by that same factor of two (P = I * E). It reduces the power losses due to conductor resistance by a factor of four (P = I^2 * R).
-Dave Haynie
When the time comes where I move to an electric car, I'll be looking to also put up my own solar/wind generators. It does not strike me as rocket surgery to have a short term battery pool charging all day long, and then plug in the car when I'm home. Probably need some power from the grid, as a car really uses a lot of amps - but I also have a fair bit of roof. The technology for charging and storing electricity keeps getting better. Generating power for home use, then reselling the excess power back seems to be structured financially to make sure it is a no-op. Having a single item for energy transfer... that seems like an area one could start introducing personal power generation on.
A Tesla Roadster seems to burn ~21.7 kWh/100 mi - seems like a a reasonable target to even try to supplement with 2-5kWh panels. (without doing the serious maths on it)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
When plugged into a home charging station the first Leafs and Volts will draw 3,300 Watts and take about 8 hours to deliver a full charge
while technically true, it ignores the reality of electric cars: people just don't drive *that* much at a time. Check and reset your trip meter every morning first time out of the garage. At 250wh/m, just how much electricity would you actually have used? At 20 miles (probably high for a lot of people), that's a whole 5kwh, about 50 cents worth. And if you plug in after every trip (like I do, coming home for lunch), even that gets spread out over the day. Sure it'll add up over time, as EVs become more common, but they've got time to prepare... At least they're thinking about it...
First and foremost: all the celebrities and government officials running public service advertisements, standing by an electric car and claiming it can be recharged for a few dollars makes me see bloody red; a bold-faced unbelievably outrageous lie that makes all conspiracy theories pale by comparison. -- They're either extremely stupid or they have huge investments in electric companies.
(If you use your neighbor's electricity - you can charge your electric car for free - until he shoots you and your stupid car too.)
A tiny 2-passenger street ready electric car requires 2.8KW over 8 hours to fully charge it's batteries - with an operating range of 80 miles on one charge at less than 40 MPH. In stop and go traffic - even less of a range - but manufacturer's specs are unspecific on that. (I wonder why). And that is if you believe those optimal stats published by the manufacturer in the first place.
A central air conditioner system for a 2000 sq ft home uses about 3KW of electricity. Now, you know, I know, and everyone knows; if you ran your central air conditioner constantly for 8 hours each day - like charging a 2.8KW battery pack for 8 hours - your electric bill will be sky-high.
Graduate up to the four-passenger and six-passenger electric cars, and now you're talking about running 3 or 4 of your neighbors' central air conditioning systems constantly for 8 hours a day - and you pay for it all. --- And, who will you buy your "fuel" from? --- Oh yeah - that little consideration no one seems to think about.
You'll buy your "fuel" from the ELECTRIC COMPANY! -- You know - that franchised monopoly that raises rates whenever they damn-well please. Have you ever seen or heard of a protest to a proposed electric rate hike cause the rate hike to be cancelled - or even reduced? - I haven't! --- And, when electric vehicle demand for electricity goes sky high, and the electric company is crying alligator tears over not being able to keep up with it without a massive rate hike, any protests to the rate hike will sound like a mouse squeak at a rock concert.
As more electric cars are produced, the electricity rates will go up and up and up, and all electric car owners will be stuck with no option but to pay the "fuel" bill for their electric car - or start walking. And everyone else will have to go back to cooking their meals and heating their house with wood since they can't afford their electricity either anymore.
Then, the question arises: how many part-time jobs will you have to have to pay your electric bill - just to get you back and forth to work to all those jobs? But, wait! -- We can all go out and buy a gasoline or propane generator to recharge our electric cars - right? -- How ironic!
Oh - but it's all about the environment - right? See above.
Yeah - what about the environment? Have you ever read the bold warning labels on taking your rechargeable batteries to an authorized recycle center when they won't recharge anymore? - Why the warning? Because all rechargeable batteries - especially Lithium-ion batteries - are extremely toxic to the environment as they decompose!!! -- making mega-amounts of CO2 look like a breath of fresh air. -- PLUS: all electric batteries produce their own gas emissions - not noticeable when it's laptop battery, or even the lead-acid battery in a car - but very noticeable to the environment with the mass production of huge batteries required to run the mass production of electric cars. Get the picture, environmentalists?
What about material costs? -- Have you priced the Lithium-ion batteries now available for running cordless power tools? -- An 18V Lithium-ion battery costs around $100 - a battery that can run an electric motor about 100th the size and power of the tiniest electric motor used in electric cars. If you run that power tool everyday for a few hours - like in construction jobs - the 18V Lithium-ion battery will last about 9 months to a year before it won't recharge anymore.
Replace the transformers and fire up some more coal fired power plants. That will fix the problem ..... Oh shit ...