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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."
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).
+1 they deserve it. just as the car industry didn't want to move along for a long time, so didn't they. they deserve having to move on again, finally.
The brownouts in CA were caused by the lack of supply. That's why CA has to buy electricity from other states.
If it were a hardware problem, buying electricity from other states wouldn't help.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I agree. I can see how distribution before you reach the home might be taxed, since while most new homes get 200 amp service I doubt the infrastructure is designed for every home to pull all 200 amps at the same time.
Also, consider that most charging is likely to take place at night. That will have a huge leveling effect on the grid. Rather than going into panic mode the electric utilities should just work with auto-makers to build timers into their chargers (maybe give the car a charge up to 25-50% if it is really low right away, and then defer the rest of the charge until the middle of the night, or have a switch to select the charging mode). They should also educate electric car owners on rate plans that charge less for power consumed at night.
The greens are starting to waver in their opposition to nuclear now, regarding it as the least-evil option for base load. But it is a slow change, as many of them grew up in the era of nuclear fear.
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
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.
I love the humor of an industry worrying about having to actually invest in, you know, itself.
This is actually another fearmongering, just like RIAA, VHS, etc all over again.
I expect in a year or two they're going to make comments like "charging your car can place hospitals at risk!" etc etc.
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.
And here I was planning on spending mod points on this one instead, but I just can't let this one slide...
Keeping in mind that I'm an environmentalist myself when I say this... the reason that the power industry in California hasn't moved at the rate it needs to is because of the enviro-nazis blocking the construction of nuclear and coal plants, and the NIMBY folks refusing to allow wind farms to be built near them. Solar's an option, but it uses a *lot* of real estate, which is at a premium in California, and there simply isn't enough moving water in California to supply the state's need with hydro-electric power.
There's large swaths of desert in eastern California that'd be perfect for solar plants, but you'd run into transmission problems, because most of that territory is nowhere near where the electricity is actually needed. Similarly, tidal power is an option off the coast of California, but that would be a tourism nightmare: there's tons of dive sites in California that attract divers from around the world, myself included.
If the power grid in California is going to evolve to meet the needs of the state, then one of two things need to happen: people need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that coal power is nowhere near as dirty as it was even 15 years ago (and *that* was a far cry from the level of pollution produced 50 years ago by coal), or they need to understand that the wind generators need to go somewhere and find a way to build it into the landscape.
I'm lucky: I live in an area where almost 100% of the electricity on the grid is provided by hydro. (Quebec). But that isn't an option in California, and they need to look into other options.
Well in this case, in many places, it is pretty much impossible to add to the infrastructure because of all the NIMBYs out there along with environmental regulation and environmental impact studies and reports (no, you can't build a substation there because of this frog, and you can't build transmission lines there because of this butterfly). It all adds up to "you can't increase the infrastructure without a concomitant increase in prices of many fold on existing customers. In many (most?) places in the US rates are set by public utility agencies and cannot go up that much very quickly. The end users (who just want to vote themselves bread and circuses and can't be bothered to understand the financial/environmental/business situation that these power companies are in) go up in arms and "follow the people's issue of the day" politicians go all ape-shit on the power companies and further regulate them. It all comes down to one hell of a sticky situation - one for which I must say I am not smart enough to find a resolution for.
the NIMBY folks refusing to allow wind farms to be built near them
tidal power is an option... but that would be a tourism nightmare: there's tons of dive sites in California that attract divers from around the world, myself included
I think you've demonstrated that we're all "NIMBY folks" in some form or another. You dive, so you recognize the value of preserving dive sites. The folks who object to wind farms surely have their own reasons that many of us just don't see or understand. Ditto for the cohorts opposed to hydro or nuclear.