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I like the idea, but there's a lot of questions that need to be answered. The term "zero-emissions" is borderline BS when the energy is coming from a source th

I like the idea, but there's a lot of questions that need to be answered. The term "zero-emissions" is borderline BS when the energy is coming from a source that emits pollution way off in the distance. If I remember correctly, California has been closing more nuclear power plants than it has been opening, so it while it's nice that our cars won't be putting out smog someday, we aren't going to take climate change seriously unless we move to nuclear. To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time. During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on, so I'm wondering whether we will be investing in electrical infrastructure this time. Nuclear can help solve that. Same with natural gas to electricity conversion(like what Bloom Energy does).

jonas21 6y ago
California has a target of 100% carbon-free energy by 2045. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/17799094/california-100-percent-clean-energy-target-brown-de-leon https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/1779909... EDIT: And on your second point, having a large number of electric vehicles may actually help smooth out load -- it's easier to temporarily throttle charging during peak load than it is to get everyone to turn off their air conditioning. Public charging stations, like Chargepoint, already do this. You can even imagine a future where you could tell your car to discharge its battery to power your home during peak demand and then charge back up overnight when power is cheap and plentiful.
- Svip 6y ago
  Does that include imported energy?
  - jonas21 6y ago
    Yes. [1] [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB100 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
- StillBored 6y ago
  Which is 10 years farther out than this car mandate. I just wish people would read about France, which despite their current stupidity, rolled out 34 reactors in something like 10 years back in the 1970's. Thereby not only going energy independent, but nearly 0 emissions. Now during the past decade or so, not only are they one of the cleanest (if not the cleanest) countries in the world, they have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and are also the largest net exporter. So, if anyone in politics actually had a brain about this, they would drive a similar mandate through with a < 10 year time-frame, so that rather than powering all those batteries with natural gas, they would be carbon free. But, no, in the USA that wont happen until we get to the point that all the 1d10t politicians (and their supporters) start starving due to food production problems or massive wars.
  - tonfa 6y ago
    Good thing the last generation of nuclear plants is only ten years behind schedule (was supposed to be done in 5 years, now estimate is 15) and 5x over budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
    - jimmaswell 6y ago
      All nuclear problems tend to be political, not practical. Makes sense when every other energy source is afraid of losing to what would be the sole power source (besides some scattered wind farms, dams, and solar panels where practical) if properly done.
  - bwilliams18 6y ago
    And the average age of a car on the road is 11.9 years, so all new cars are zero emission by 2035 and nearly half of the cars on the road are zero emission by 2045 when energy generation is 100% clean. This sounds like exactly the right plan, get one of the biggest and most distributed users of dirty sources to electric, then worry about converting the highly concentrated (relative to cars) power producers to go to 100% clean energy.
imglorp 6y ago
To address centralized polluting, the advantage is that it's refactored out of millions of cars into one grid. As they adjust the sources in the future, all the cars keep going. Also, centralizing generation allows for easier observation. One thing you didn't mention is efficiency. Electrics are around 60% and gas around 20%. Once you have some power at the car, you make better much use of it. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/10/electric-car-myth-buster-efficiency/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/10/electric-car-myth-buste...
phkahler 6y ago
>> During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on... That was my first thought as well. Gotta love rolling blackouts. But EV charging will likely take place at night when air conditioners are pulling less power so maybe it will smooth things out? They're still gonna have to support the peak load and do so more often.
Guvante 6y ago
> I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time Really well actually, done correctly it will actually make power production cheaper per watt for everyone. Since cars spend the vast majority of their time idle they can charge whenever. Whenever in this case being the middle of the night when the lack of workers causes power usage to bottom out. The power companies would prefer a flat usage line and having cars that can intelligently start charging when ideal can totally help with that. Additionally I would point out that while zero-emissions is a bit disingenuous electric cars are the only real path forward to zero-emissions. The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I run numbers and then years later only remember the rough result. But for a gasoline powered car 10-20% of the CO2 emissions are from manufacturing. So EV's help reduce CO2 emissions a lot. EV's emissions during manufacture are currently a bit higher than gasoline powered cars but not by much. That said cars and the infrastructure needed to support them requires enormous amounts of resources, EV's don't change that much. But what what are you going to do? On the other hand for California zero emission also means no NOx, SOX and PM2.5 tail pipe emissions in cities where most people live. Granted EV's produce some PM2.5 from tires and brakes. But that's a percentage of tail pipe emissions.
- zizee 6y ago
  > The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce. I am happy to be corrected, but I believe the only industrial scale production of hydrogen is splitting hydrocarbons. Using electrolysis is hugely inefficient. If this is true, a lot of talk of hydrogen is submarine marketing for the fossil fuel industry.
  - ip26 6y ago
    Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are supposedly meant to be powered by electrolysis, which in turn would be driven by renewables. Personally, I suspect the fossil fuel industry loves hydrogen fuel cells mainly because they are safely 10-20 years away.
boringg 6y ago
There are questions that still need to be answered. I will respond to your comments as there are some inaccuracies and understanding the problems and solutions in greater detail can lead to better dialogue. 1. Zero-emissions - you are arguing semantics - if you are an EV and are sourcing your energy in CA your carbon emissions are very low. 2. CA is closing Nuclear plants and are doing alright. The loss in baseload power is getting replaced by inventive policies DR policies, energy storage, solar and some natural gas. No, the answer isn't just more Nuclear - can Nuclear be part of the solution? Maybe - Nuclear is really expensive and has some siting and health challenges. 3. The grid will tolerate a change in the overall load profile (i.e. more EVs) by dispatching new programs, new price signals and new assets that are variable. 4. California doesn't struggle to keep the lights on in the summer - it had rolling blackouts that have yet to be determined the first time in 19 years this year (19 years ago was due to illicit energy trading i.e. Enron trading). It does do rolling blackouts for risks to wild fires.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> California has been closing more nuclear power plants than it has been opening, California has brought far more solar/ wind power online over the past 20 years than they've retired nuclear power plants. They are also slowly phasing out non-renewable power. Though the pace isn't as fast as many would like, it's happening. > To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time. For the typical 10,000-20,000 mile/ year driver, an electric car uses less power than it takes to air condition a California home. If you have even a small solar install—which makes tons of sense in California—the load on the grid is near zero.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  One can run the numbers. Average car drives 12500 miles a year. Is ~35 miles a day. EV's get 3-4 miles a kwh. So what? consume ~12 kwh/day. That's not much. $2 worth of electricity. And $3-4,000 worth of solar panels will produce that much a day. Compare that to the car that costs ten times as much.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    I don't want to talk about what my electric bill was like when I lived in California, and the number of 100+ degree days has gotten worse since we moved out.
  - runako 6y ago
    > $3-4,000 worth of solar panels Is this a useful metric in California? In the states where I have lived, the total installed system cost has always been the driver, and the panels typically are only one component of many there. $3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels.
    - danans 6y ago
      > $3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels. I doubt it. I installed a ~2.5kW system in CA 4 years ago, and all in it was like $6500 after the tax credits. Panel prices have dropped 16% since then, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if now the same system were around $4k including installation after tax credits.
Tade0 6y ago
we aren't going to take climate change seriously unless we move to nuclear. A nuclear plant is still a steam engine, so it would require significant amounts of water to cool, which aren't that easy to come by in a land where droughts happen so often. Also there's so much sun there and solar panels are so cheap nowadays that waiting 7-odd years for a plant to start producing power doesn't look like a viable option. China is leading the world in new nuclear power deployment, but still in terms of delivered GWh wind overtook nuclear there in 2012 and the gap is widening. Solar will cross that point in a few years. If even a totalitarian state can't deploy nuclear at a pace competitive with alternatives, how is a place like California supposed to?
- babesh 6y ago
  Many nuclear power plants suck in water from the ocean. In fact, 3 of the 4 in California are on the coast. You can see one of them on the drive between LA and San Diego. EDIT: That one is being decommissioned https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?msa=0&mid=1t0te1lvPsMd0yMcThlJnpjJ5lQE&ll=37.1035829790505%2C-120.7825435&z=5 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?msa=0&mid=1t0te1lvPsMd0...
  - babesh 6y ago
    Actually, the only one that is still running is Diablo Canyon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
- barnesto 6y ago
  In California we have droughts. We also have really poor water management. Lack of storage and dams. Then there's the delta smelt issue. They basically created a dustbowl in many locations because of their very poor resource management, which isn't contained to water. Hello rolling blackouts.
centimeter 6y ago
Why would anyone trust a state to make grid management decisions when they can't even reliably provide power to their citizens?
notJim 6y ago
I can't find the link right now, but I read a paper recently that electric cars are about twice as efficient as gas cars, so even if we only switched to electric cars, we'd massively reduce our energy consumption.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
> how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time Use this thing software and market. All of the cars can delay charge or buy when price is at particular point. Weird tho Tesla avoids grid capability. CHAdeMO is in every EV in Japan (including fuel cell one). Can't find the stats how widely they are used tho.
labcomputer 6y ago
> how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time Glad you asked. The typical driver drives 12k to 15k miles per year. That's about 33 to 41 miles per day, or about the range of a 1st Gen Chevy Volt. The thing is, you can recharge a Volt overnight from a normal household outlet (the kind you already have in your living room, kitchen, or garage). In other words, it uses only about as much power (~1.5 kW) as your toaster, coffee maker, hair dryer, or vacuum cleaner. It is dramatically less power than a central AC unit (around 4 to 6 kW). So, no, this is not going to cause a massive problem for the grid. > During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on, so I'm wondering whether we will be investing in electrical infrastructure this time. This is more of a PG&E problem than a California problem. LA and Santa Clara both have municipally-owned electrical utilities (including generation and transmission) that don't have a problem keeping the lights on.

jonas21 6y ago

California has a target of 100% carbon-free energy by 2045. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/17799094/california-100-percent-clean-energy-target-brown-de-leon https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/1779909... EDIT: And on your second point, having a large number of electric vehicles may actually help smooth out load -- it's easier to temporarily throttle charging during peak load than it is to get everyone to turn off their air conditioning. Public charging stations, like Chargepoint, already do this. You can even imagine a future where you could tell your car to discharge its battery to power your home during peak demand and then charge back up overnight when power is cheap and plentiful.

Svip 6y ago
Does that include imported energy?
- jonas21 6y ago
  Yes. [1] [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB100 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
StillBored 6y ago
Which is 10 years farther out than this car mandate. I just wish people would read about France, which despite their current stupidity, rolled out 34 reactors in something like 10 years back in the 1970's. Thereby not only going energy independent, but nearly 0 emissions. Now during the past decade or so, not only are they one of the cleanest (if not the cleanest) countries in the world, they have some of the cheapest electricity in Europe, and are also the largest net exporter. So, if anyone in politics actually had a brain about this, they would drive a similar mandate through with a < 10 year time-frame, so that rather than powering all those batteries with natural gas, they would be carbon free. But, no, in the USA that wont happen until we get to the point that all the 1d10t politicians (and their supporters) start starving due to food production problems or massive wars.
- tonfa 6y ago
  Good thing the last generation of nuclear plants is only ten years behind schedule (was supposed to be done in 5 years, now estimate is 15) and 5x over budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    All nuclear problems tend to be political, not practical. Makes sense when every other energy source is afraid of losing to what would be the sole power source (besides some scattered wind farms, dams, and solar panels where practical) if properly done.
- bwilliams18 6y ago
  And the average age of a car on the road is 11.9 years, so all new cars are zero emission by 2035 and nearly half of the cars on the road are zero emission by 2045 when energy generation is 100% clean. This sounds like exactly the right plan, get one of the biggest and most distributed users of dirty sources to electric, then worry about converting the highly concentrated (relative to cars) power producers to go to 100% clean energy.

imglorp 6y ago

To address centralized polluting, the advantage is that it's refactored out of millions of cars into one grid. As they adjust the sources in the future, all the cars keep going. Also, centralizing generation allows for easier observation. One thing you didn't mention is efficiency. Electrics are around 60% and gas around 20%. Once you have some power at the car, you make better much use of it. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/10/electric-car-myth-buster-efficiency/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/10/electric-car-myth-buste...

phkahler 6y ago

>> During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on... That was my first thought as well. Gotta love rolling blackouts. But EV charging will likely take place at night when air conditioners are pulling less power so maybe it will smooth things out? They're still gonna have to support the peak load and do so more often.

Guvante 6y ago

> I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time Really well actually, done correctly it will actually make power production cheaper per watt for everyone. Since cars spend the vast majority of their time idle they can charge whenever. Whenever in this case being the middle of the night when the lack of workers causes power usage to bottom out. The power companies would prefer a flat usage line and having cars that can intelligently start charging when ideal can totally help with that. Additionally I would point out that while zero-emissions is a bit disingenuous electric cars are the only real path forward to zero-emissions. The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce.

Gibbon1 6y ago
I run numbers and then years later only remember the rough result. But for a gasoline powered car 10-20% of the CO2 emissions are from manufacturing. So EV's help reduce CO2 emissions a lot. EV's emissions during manufacture are currently a bit higher than gasoline powered cars but not by much. That said cars and the infrastructure needed to support them requires enormous amounts of resources, EV's don't change that much. But what what are you going to do? On the other hand for California zero emission also means no NOx, SOX and PM2.5 tail pipe emissions in cities where most people live. Granted EV's produce some PM2.5 from tires and brakes. But that's a percentage of tail pipe emissions.
zizee 6y ago
> The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce. I am happy to be corrected, but I believe the only industrial scale production of hydrogen is splitting hydrocarbons. Using electrolysis is hugely inefficient. If this is true, a lot of talk of hydrogen is submarine marketing for the fossil fuel industry.
- ip26 6y ago
  Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are supposedly meant to be powered by electrolysis, which in turn would be driven by renewables. Personally, I suspect the fossil fuel industry loves hydrogen fuel cells mainly because they are safely 10-20 years away.

boringg 6y ago

There are questions that still need to be answered. I will respond to your comments as there are some inaccuracies and understanding the problems and solutions in greater detail can lead to better dialogue. 1. Zero-emissions - you are arguing semantics - if you are an EV and are sourcing your energy in CA your carbon emissions are very low. 2. CA is closing Nuclear plants and are doing alright. The loss in baseload power is getting replaced by inventive policies DR policies, energy storage, solar and some natural gas. No, the answer isn't just more Nuclear - can Nuclear be part of the solution? Maybe - Nuclear is really expensive and has some siting and health challenges. 3. The grid will tolerate a change in the overall load profile (i.e. more EVs) by dispatching new programs, new price signals and new assets that are variable. 4. California doesn't struggle to keep the lights on in the summer - it had rolling blackouts that have yet to be determined the first time in 19 years this year (19 years ago was due to illicit energy trading i.e. Enron trading). It does do rolling blackouts for risks to wild fires.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> California has been closing more nuclear power plants than it has been opening, California has brought far more solar/ wind power online over the past 20 years than they've retired nuclear power plants. They are also slowly phasing out non-renewable power. Though the pace isn't as fast as many would like, it's happening. > To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time. For the typical 10,000-20,000 mile/ year driver, an electric car uses less power than it takes to air condition a California home. If you have even a small solar install—which makes tons of sense in California—the load on the grid is near zero.

Gibbon1 6y ago
One can run the numbers. Average car drives 12500 miles a year. Is ~35 miles a day. EV's get 3-4 miles a kwh. So what? consume ~12 kwh/day. That's not much. $2 worth of electricity. And $3-4,000 worth of solar panels will produce that much a day. Compare that to the car that costs ten times as much.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I don't want to talk about what my electric bill was like when I lived in California, and the number of 100+ degree days has gotten worse since we moved out.
- runako 6y ago
  > $3-4,000 worth of solar panels Is this a useful metric in California? In the states where I have lived, the total installed system cost has always been the driver, and the panels typically are only one component of many there. $3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels.
  - danans 6y ago
    > $3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels. I doubt it. I installed a ~2.5kW system in CA 4 years ago, and all in it was like $6500 after the tax credits. Panel prices have dropped 16% since then, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if now the same system were around $4k including installation after tax credits.

Tade0 6y ago

we aren't going to take climate change seriously unless we move to nuclear. A nuclear plant is still a steam engine, so it would require significant amounts of water to cool, which aren't that easy to come by in a land where droughts happen so often. Also there's so much sun there and solar panels are so cheap nowadays that waiting 7-odd years for a plant to start producing power doesn't look like a viable option. China is leading the world in new nuclear power deployment, but still in terms of delivered GWh wind overtook nuclear there in 2012 and the gap is widening. Solar will cross that point in a few years. If even a totalitarian state can't deploy nuclear at a pace competitive with alternatives, how is a place like California supposed to?

babesh 6y ago
Many nuclear power plants suck in water from the ocean. In fact, 3 of the 4 in California are on the coast. You can see one of them on the drive between LA and San Diego. EDIT: That one is being decommissioned https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?msa=0&mid=1t0te1lvPsMd0yMcThlJnpjJ5lQE&ll=37.1035829790505%2C-120.7825435&z=5 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?msa=0&mid=1t0te1lvPsMd0...
- babesh 6y ago
  Actually, the only one that is still running is Diablo Canyon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
barnesto 6y ago
In California we have droughts. We also have really poor water management. Lack of storage and dams. Then there's the delta smelt issue. They basically created a dustbowl in many locations because of their very poor resource management, which isn't contained to water. Hello rolling blackouts.

centimeter 6y ago

Why would anyone trust a state to make grid management decisions when they can't even reliably provide power to their citizens?

notJim 6y ago

I can't find the link right now, but I read a paper recently that electric cars are about twice as efficient as gas cars, so even if we only switched to electric cars, we'd massively reduce our energy consumption.

dzhiurgis 6y ago

> how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time Use this thing software and market. All of the cars can delay charge or buy when price is at particular point. Weird tho Tesla avoids grid capability. CHAdeMO is in every EV in Japan (including fuel cell one). Can't find the stats how widely they are used tho.

labcomputer 6y ago

> how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time Glad you asked. The typical driver drives 12k to 15k miles per year. That's about 33 to 41 miles per day, or about the range of a 1st Gen Chevy Volt. The thing is, you can recharge a Volt overnight from a normal household outlet (the kind you already have in your living room, kitchen, or garage). In other words, it uses only about as much power (~1.5 kW) as your toaster, coffee maker, hair dryer, or vacuum cleaner. It is dramatically less power than a central AC unit (around 4 to 6 kW). So, no, this is not going to cause a massive problem for the grid. > During the summer California struggles to keep the lights on, so I'm wondering whether we will be investing in electrical infrastructure this time. This is more of a PG&E problem than a California problem. LA and Santa Clara both have municipally-owned electrical utilities (including generation and transmission) that don't have a problem keeping the lights on.