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America’s Power Grid Isn’t Ready for Electric Cars

20 points by watchdogtimer 8y ago

basicplus2 8y ago
All that oil not used in cars could be used to power charging stations...
chmaynard 8y ago
Citylab.com has published some great articles, but this isn't one of them. It's not clear to me why they published this article or who the intended audience is. And I'm skeptical of the conclusions, given that the article doesn't mention the rise of wind and PV solar power generation coupled with energy storage capacity.
- curyous 8y ago
  FYI, electric cars can also act as grid energy storage capacity.
  - ants_a 8y ago
    Could, in theory, with additional hardware and integration and agreements needed.
- appleiigs 8y ago
  Agree. All it says is: if all cars magically turned electrical today, we'd need more electricity. No discussion of the risks/barriers in place to get more electricity. (By the way, technology and infrastructure investment aren't the bottlenecks here. It would be the perverse politicians and bone-headed bureaucrats at the electric system operators.) Also, no discussion about solutions as you mentioned. Given I'm in a bad mood, I bet the purpose of the article is simply to get published so the authors can sell their expertise to some regulatory hearing.
- intopieces 8y ago
  I think the writer of the headline was not the writer of the article. A more accurate title "Most states need power grid upgrade for future EV demand". Agreed that there was a missed opportunity in mentioning the rise of wind/PV/battery.
angry_octet 8y ago
It is pretty average that they didn't discuss the fact that the peaking power plants are very expensive, typically burning higher grade fuels like natural gas or diesel, rather than goal or nuclear. And, rather than encourage old style night time off-peak use, we need charging to occur during solar PV peak on colder days, and cars (mobile batteries) to supply to the grid during peak summer load, providing grid stabilisation to account for wind/PV variability.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Thanks to decades of stalling-off and fossil-fueled obstructive lobbying, so far we've largely failed to build anywhere-near-adequate de-centralized and alternative energy sources. Originally the fossilers hoped to keep viable alternatives out of the public eye. Now that that's failed, they've got paid foolers running around. Rome's burning. Nobody wants to make the small sacrifices, nobody wants to think about the Big Sacrifice. So it goes.
mchannon 8y ago
Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil refineries. Almost all of it goes to making “branchy” isomers needed for gasoline, or things like hydro desulfurization. Reduce the demand for gasoline and diesel, and now you have surplus electricity, which so happens to be more per gallon than the equivalent electrical energy in a gge of EV usage. This isn’t a panacea- if you don’t have refineries in the area, and/or their power can’t be fed to the grid, you might have a problem. California and Texas are solid, though.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  I tried looking, and couldn't find anywhere close to a source that says that refining gasoline consumes so much electricity you'd get more mileage using it to power a BEV. Do you have something
  - mchannon 8y ago
    This page, although a bit sloppy maybe, has a lot of referenced links in it that should help you find what you're looking for: https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasol...
    - reitzensteinm 8y ago
      Yeah, that was one place I looked. But the only credible linked calculation had it at 0.2, not 6. The others seem to conflate energy with electricity consumption (it doesn't at all surprise me that the process uses a lot of energy, just the supposed electrical consumption). Further, the back of the napkin just doesn't work out. The US refines 18.5 million barrels a day (for 2012 from WP), or 283 billion gallons a year. This implies 1698 billion kWh of consumption out of 4015 billion kWh total electrical production, or more than the total which is used by industry (one third). You seemed to know what you were talking about which is why I asked for a source... I have a very hard time believing it's even within an order of magnitude of the correct figure.
natch 8y ago
This piece is an obvious plant by the anti-electric lobby. The article does not mention the word "battery" in any of its forms ("battery", "batteries") even once. And yet batteries are the proven solution to exactly the problem they are pretending is unsolvable.
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
obviously bollocks
woodandsteel 8y ago
What if, as seems quite certain, much of the electricity is supplied from off the grid by solar energy at homes, work places, shopping malls, and so on? It seems the me the article was designed to make the problem look more difficult than it really is, as a way of undermining the adoption of EV's.
mizchief2 8y ago
This is why I keep saying that if you are serious about climate change then you are serous about nuclear power. It's our best source of reliable non-carbon producing power and the more cheaply and cleanly we can produce electricity the more opportunity we have to stop using fossil fuels in more areas.

20 points by watchdogtimer 8y ago

All that oil not used in cars could be used to power charging stations...

Citylab.com has published some great articles, but this isn't one of them. It's not clear to me why they published this article or who the intended audience is. And I'm skeptical of the conclusions, given that the article doesn't mention the rise of wind and PV solar power generation coupled with energy storage capacity.

curyous 8y ago
FYI, electric cars can also act as grid energy storage capacity.
- ants_a 8y ago
  Could, in theory, with additional hardware and integration and agreements needed.
appleiigs 8y ago
Agree. All it says is: if all cars magically turned electrical today, we'd need more electricity. No discussion of the risks/barriers in place to get more electricity. (By the way, technology and infrastructure investment aren't the bottlenecks here. It would be the perverse politicians and bone-headed bureaucrats at the electric system operators.) Also, no discussion about solutions as you mentioned. Given I'm in a bad mood, I bet the purpose of the article is simply to get published so the authors can sell their expertise to some regulatory hearing.
intopieces 8y ago
I think the writer of the headline was not the writer of the article. A more accurate title "Most states need power grid upgrade for future EV demand". Agreed that there was a missed opportunity in mentioning the rise of wind/PV/battery.

angry_octet 8y ago

It is pretty average that they didn't discuss the fact that the peaking power plants are very expensive, typically burning higher grade fuels like natural gas or diesel, rather than goal or nuclear. And, rather than encourage old style night time off-peak use, we need charging to occur during solar PV peak on colder days, and cars (mobile batteries) to supply to the grid during peak summer load, providing grid stabilisation to account for wind/PV variability.

8bitsrule 8y ago

Thanks to decades of stalling-off and fossil-fueled obstructive lobbying, so far we've largely failed to build anywhere-near-adequate de-centralized and alternative energy sources. Originally the fossilers hoped to keep viable alternatives out of the public eye. Now that that's failed, they've got paid foolers running around. Rome's burning. Nobody wants to make the small sacrifices, nobody wants to think about the Big Sacrifice. So it goes.

mchannon 8y ago

Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil refineries. Almost all of it goes to making “branchy” isomers needed for gasoline, or things like hydro desulfurization. Reduce the demand for gasoline and diesel, and now you have surplus electricity, which so happens to be more per gallon than the equivalent electrical energy in a gge of EV usage. This isn’t a panacea- if you don’t have refineries in the area, and/or their power can’t be fed to the grid, you might have a problem. California and Texas are solid, though.

reitzensteinm 8y ago
I tried looking, and couldn't find anywhere close to a source that says that refining gasoline consumes so much electricity you'd get more mileage using it to power a BEV. Do you have something
- mchannon 8y ago
  This page, although a bit sloppy maybe, has a lot of referenced links in it that should help you find what you're looking for: https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasol...
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    Yeah, that was one place I looked. But the only credible linked calculation had it at 0.2, not 6. The others seem to conflate energy with electricity consumption (it doesn't at all surprise me that the process uses a lot of energy, just the supposed electrical consumption). Further, the back of the napkin just doesn't work out. The US refines 18.5 million barrels a day (for 2012 from WP), or 283 billion gallons a year. This implies 1698 billion kWh of consumption out of 4015 billion kWh total electrical production, or more than the total which is used by industry (one third). You seemed to know what you were talking about which is why I asked for a source... I have a very hard time believing it's even within an order of magnitude of the correct figure.

natch 8y ago

This piece is an obvious plant by the anti-electric lobby. The article does not mention the word "battery" in any of its forms ("battery", "batteries") even once. And yet batteries are the proven solution to exactly the problem they are pretending is unsolvable.

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

obviously bollocks

woodandsteel 8y ago

What if, as seems quite certain, much of the electricity is supplied from off the grid by solar energy at homes, work places, shopping malls, and so on? It seems the me the article was designed to make the problem look more difficult than it really is, as a way of undermining the adoption of EV's.

mizchief2 8y ago

This is why I keep saying that if you are serious about climate change then you are serous about nuclear power. It's our best source of reliable non-carbon producing power and the more cheaply and cleanly we can produce electricity the more opportunity we have to stop using fossil fuels in more areas.