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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."
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.
You mean Enron?
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
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.
Spot on here!
The trouble is the distribution. I don't know about the voltages used in the states, but often the electricity is transformed down to 33/11kV, because these voltages are rather simply run underground. So in the average distribution network, you hit a number of (down-)transformers and a number of (underground) cabling until the 3x400V reach the client. It would cost billions to rip it out and put back another one that supports charging of electric cars.
The trouble is also in the distribution with respect to daytime. Some might think, that they already use a high energy load, maybe even 3, 6 or 12 kW; and 'what is the difference?'. The difference is that until now, high loads are somewhat randomly distributed over time, and usually run for short time-spans. So a 12 kW load runs from 8-9 here, and another one maybe 2-4 there.
But think about it: In future when the working population comes home in the evenings, they will want to recharge their cars for the trip to work next morning. Unfortunately, evenings are already the times of highest load in residential areas: lighting, heating, air-co, ovens, you name it.
And it would be very wrong to blame the situation on some '50 year old hardware' or so. It could not be more wrong. The distribution networks were simply not designed with recharging of electric cars at homes in mind; and even less with additional loads correlating with already peak hours.
"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"
WTF? There's NO shortage of lithium whatsoever. Absolutely NONE.
You can mine it indefinitely from seawater for about $70 per kg. Ecological footprint of lithium mining is also trivial - it's mined from salt planes which are not known for their rich ecology.
You are incorrect.
Here is the scenario in a nut-shell. California began full-on price fixing because they decided energy prices were too high, causing a long term shortage of supply (nobody wanted to build new power plants in california, nor sell power at below market prices to california's distributors.)
In response to this shortage, they deregulated energy production in the hopes that this would spur more in-state production, which it did. The problem was that they continued to price-fix the distributors, so the old and new in-state energy producers sold to out-of-state markets first..
The shortages grew worse and worse because of this. The in-state distributors, forced to buy at market prices but sell at lower fixed prices, began losing money hand-over-fist. The state then responded by heavily subsidizing the distributors through taxes but even that wasnt enough to save some of the them from bankruptcy.
This is the same old "manage from the top" good-intentions failure we often see.
"His name was James Damore."
Funny how you leave out the biggest piece of this: Enron. The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices. So your "scenario in a nut-shell" is using a nut that selectively includes in its narrative only the government as a player, despite that private industry was as much or more at the center of the story as government practices, that the private industry was in large extent crooked, and that deregulation on the government's side was essential to the run-away crookedness on the private industries' side which resulted in, for example, brownouts when totally operational power plants were turned off in order to raise the spot-market prices from the electrical generators which were still on line - putting billions into Enron's pockets, as well as into the pockets of several of it peers.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton