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First Electric Cars Have Power Industry Worried

Posted by Soulskill on from the they'll-find-a-way-to-charge-double-for-it dept.

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."

16 of 450 comments (clear)

  1. Good! by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Good! by DJRumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, from what I recall, it was due to deregulation, not price fixing.

      http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/cal-m22.shtml

    2. Re:Good! by superdude72 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Lack of supply caused when energy traders figured out--in the badly deregulated market--that they could take plants offline for "repairs" at strategic moments and cause the price to spike by 1000 percent.

    3. Re:Good! by SimonTheSoundMan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What I meant to say is the supply in to the house could cope with 100kW.

      Just had some asbestos removed, and the ventilation system was using 50kW (5 x 10kW fan units). We had a 400A supply breaker installed by the electric board, it was 125A before that.

      We thought at first we may have required a new supply, as we were told the fans were 90.9A each at 240V, but they were 110V. This is where I found out the 100kW was our maximum when speaking to our electric supplier. They wouldn't have been able to supply more on one supply as our substation on our street only copes with 100kW per household/phase.

      Want I was meaning to say, capacity is there if a household manages to have two Tesla cars, for example. I found it quite odd that some some parts of America can only cope with 12kW supply, and there is a huge difference to what we are supplied with here in the UK.

    4. Re:Good! by hawguy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The UK power distribution network works differently than in the USA.

      In the UK, they tend to use large (up to ~1MW) substations that power a large number of houses (they can do this because the higher household voltage leads to less distribution power loss). In the USA, they use smaller pole mounted transformers (~16KVA- 100KVA) that serve a few houses. A few neighbors with high capacity charge stations can exceed the capacity of the transformer.

      Another benefit of the UK model is that smart charging stations gives the power company more flexibility in distributing the load - it's easier to spread the load out from 5pm - 9am (or even all day long) since there may be 100 or more households in the substation with varying needs and commute times. In the US, if a few neighbors have to charge from 11pm - 5am, the power company may not be able to stagger the charge times enough to keep the load under the transformer capacity.

    5. Re:Good! by superdude72 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Er... no. I lived in California from 1974-2010 and I don't recall anything approaching a "crisis" in electricity and natural gas prices until the one in the early 2000s.

      Unless you mean "crisis" in the sense that we now have a crisis in Social Security: ie, a phony crisis ginned up by some folks on Wall Street who want to make a buck.

    6. Re:Good! by xaxa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Some long-running soaps in the UK have huge audiences, and when the adverts start all the viewers turn the kettle on for a cup of tea.

      See here.

    7. Re:Good! by Dr+Max · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Have they considered charging up the cars in the middle of the night on off-peak electricity, while there is minimal stress on the network? Then if the drivers really want to charge up any time in the day; they can have a spare removable battery that you pre charged the night before. It would solve the problem and save people money on the electricity bill.

      --
      Rocket Surgeon.
    8. Re:Good! by eleuthero · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In many of my conversations with Europeans on the subject of distances between places (and this covers hundreds of conversations over my twice yearly trips over the past decade), there is some confusion over the actual distances involved in the US. Just as Americans might typically exaggerate distances between, say, Madrid and Paris (and I know several who do) because they are in different countries (and the US is large), many in the Europe seem to do the opposite (shrinking distances because the US is only one country). I am talking about educated adults in both countries who know how to use a map but simply don't actively think about the measured distances between points.

      So perhaps "several near national [sic] wide powerouts" refers to the GP's perception of distance. On top of this, if you've seen news in Europe, America regularly suffers from horrifying national catastrophes on a regular basis (hurricanes putting millions at risk, tornadoes impacting whole regions of the country, earthquakes being felt across areas the size of Spain, etc.). Just like news in America sensationalizes, so does its European set of counterparts.

    9. Re:Good! by MrKaos · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 think you are missing the point. All of this talk about building generating capacity is irrelevant if the power distribution grid cannot deliver the power to where it is required. That is what the article does not say, the piece of wire between the power plant and your house can only deliver approximately 30% of the power an electric car infrastructure will require.

      For a moment think about what is happening. The kilowatts, per vehicle, once delivered by oil is delivered by wire. I however cannot speak to the sanity of sitting in a traffic jam for hours of the day but if we maintain this "way of life" ALL of that infrastructure HAS to be upgraded if people are to charge their cars at home and if parking stations are to be equipped with charging facilities.

      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

      Keep in mind that I am an advocate of deploying Nuclear Power responsibly when I say this ... the reason the Nuclear industry hasn't expanded is because it is rife with Basis Design Issues when deploying new plants. The NRC commissioned Nuclear plant manufacturers (Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison) to come up design recommendations to improve the safety of the plants but the AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. This has nothing to do with anyone or anything other than economic reasons and design changes made to produce the AP-1000 design are there to make Nuclear plants cheaper to build, but they are still expensive. Coal plants are a completely different argument and can be built with the standard 40-50 year finance plan that these plants are built with as the risk affecting return is different. Yes a modern coal plant is more efficient but it still produced a lot of carbon externality.

      If anything a decentralisation of the grid will reduce the *cost* of the upgrades required to deliver the current to charge electric vehicles. I doubt there is any party who won't benefit from evolving the grid as the time has certainly come to drive efficiency into it for many other reasons. Our society is encountering growing pains. Our society either adapts to these changes or it withers. The status quo has to change and the opportunity we have now is to create more balanced lifestyles that takes the pressure off our infrastructure.

      Every transaction our society conducts costs energy and you must have the means to *deliver* that energy to where it is required. Until we reduce and balance the energetic costs required to run our society we will continue to encounter these types of problems and building new power plants is analogous to printing money in this respect. Quite simply humanity has choice of sustaining growth or growing sustainability.

      --
      My ism, it's full of beliefs.
  2. What's old is new again by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... 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.
    1. Re:What's old is new again by rolfwind · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I push for this often, but I seriously don't know why the car companies go after the diesel electric model trains use (not to be confused with hybrid where the engine isn't solely there to make electricity but has the added complexity of being coupled to the driveshaft along with the electrical motor). There would be no range issues nor would it stress the electric grid, nor require a ton of costly batteries that will age and need replacing. The savings in gasoline will come from the fact that it will have a really tiny engine (in comparison) running in it's optimum band of power all the time vs a huge engine whose capacity is really only used in hard acceleration and otherwise is overkill the rest of the time. (And no, the engine need not be diesel, it can be gasoline 4 stroke, 2 stroke, stirling, what have you. Really the beauty of the entire concept, the local powerplant is modular.)

      This electric only probably won't work too well the first time someone needs to turn the heater on for the entire trip, not to mention people who don't have homes and garages. That seems like a huge segment of people to me to cut out when it's not necessary.

  3. Re:These numbers don't make sense. by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Many electric companies are pushing smart grid devices to do load leveling right now. This summer I had a visit from my power company where they wanted permission to install a device that would participate in a rolling shutoff of air conditioners. Since I don't trust these guys I refused. I think it's just a strategy to avoid having to invest in improving their infrastructure. Now reading this I'm glad I did. They are going to have to deal with their crappy infrastructure anyway.

  4. Re:Worried? by mwooldri · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some of those areas don't have variable electric tariffs that promote use of electricity when the electric company wants you to use the electric. Here in central NC, most residential customers just have one electrical rate - whatever the electric company wants to charge, and there's no competition. However because the electric infrastructure around here was built around supplying lots of electric power to the textile mills and they have now been shut down, the power companies have excess capacity here. Datacenters are coming here to fill the void somewhat, but not in terms of raw number of employed people. But when it comes to electric vehicles the interim solution is for electric companies to offer an "electric vehicle" tariff on a circuit that is controlled by the electric company - and to encourage EV users to charge at times convenient to the electric company. However these charging stations should IMO make use of a dual circuit - giving EV owners the option to give their vehicle a charge boost at peak power pricing, whilst giving the same option of garaging the vehicle overnight to charge when the electric company thinks it can send power to that charging station.

  5. Re:Time to refit your house by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My Roadster has it's own 100Amp circuit, but that's because it draws almost 7000 watts when charging. I had to have my home's 100Amp service entrance upgraded (to 300amps), and new conduit/copper run to the garage to handle it.

  6. Been there (by train) seen that and not done that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.