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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."
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.
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).
... 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.
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.
yes, but the constant stops at every train station will make your trip take forever.
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...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
And you actually think the service into a neighborhood can take everyone drawing 200 amps?
Not even remotely close.
Hell, the generation capacity for most power companies is carefully managed to meet the expected peak demand of the customers they have, at a specific rate of typical peak usage.
Increase that by ten percent, and you'll get rolling brownouts or blackouts during the summer when people are running their A/C.
The US has a 3rd world power infrastructure that is cobbled together to work in exactly the environment they're in.
Hell, the climate shifts are already causing grief to power companies because they're getting even small percentage increases in the number of peak days or the length of the heating or cooling seasons.
Add a 7kw charger to 10% of their customers and you're in BIG trouble, especially if it makes the generation profile change substantially. (A lot of hydro plants, for example, shut their outflow off at night to maintain water levels behind dams because the demand is low at night -- if its not, then water will have to be drawn down 24/7 -- something they aren't set up for.)
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.
I've already started converting my house to run on gasoline, thus leaving enough electricity for charging my car.
Mostly random stuff.
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.
What mistake? Would it have made more sense to go around randomly upgrading neighborhoods years ago when it wasn't yet clear that electric cars were going to reach the market in any significant numbers??
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.
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.
So I take it that V2G is bullshit? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_to_grid
www.itjerk.com
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
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.
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.
You certainly should be able to draw 200A from any 200A residential electrical service that is in good operating condition.
However, if all the homes on your block try to do so simultaneously, you will hear a loud bang as the fuse on the primary side of the distribution transformer opens, and you and your neighbors will be sitting in the dark waiting for the power company to come out to change it.
Residential services are not fused individually, except by the main breaker in each service panel. The final overcurrent device before the power hits your home is on the high voltage primary side of the step-down transformer, which typically feeds anywhere from several homes to an entire block.
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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?
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.
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.
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.