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Electric cars are coming fast – is the nation’s grid up to it?

erratas 6y ago
yes
- ChrisIsTaken 6y ago
  Yeah, most people are recharging 20-30 miles of daily driving not the whole battery. As long as the car pulls its 10-15 kWh overnight before it leaves the garage in the morning EV owners aren't going to care when charging happens. With managed charging / demand response and day ahead weather forecasting you'd rarely need to spin up a gas turbine. On the coasts wind is strongest at night, the distribution grid is at minimum load and cars are parked. Seems like a perfect match.
  - galangalalgol 6y ago
    Someone should probably check areas like denver where everyone will pack up and head a full charge into the mountains every weekend.
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      How many is "everyone"? All of your friends and acquaintances or literally 100% of the population?
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      Given the shitshow that I've heard that highway is, you'd think someone would have developed an economical public transit option specifically for skiers / mountain rec. Whenever I look into this kind of thing when I plan ski vacations I find the bussing options outrageously priced (for example from Calgary to Banff or Kelowna to Revelstoke, etc.) and it ends up being more economical for a family to simply rent a car. Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas, apparently. And much of the alps is accessed this way (tho in general European travel by rail is much more of a thing)
      - ghaff 6y ago
        >Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas I'm guessing you probably still needed transportation of some sort from the train stations to the mountains. One of the issues with just having a bus is that a lot of ski resorts have multiple base areas and most of the lodging and eating options are off-mountain. Some are pretty self-contained but the layout for resorts in the northeast for example pretty much presupposes that you have a car if you're going for a weekend. There are self-contained exceptions of course but many aren't.
        cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        A few ski area towns in Vermont actually still have their own local transit. I know at least Waitsfield (Sugarbush / Mt Elln & Mad River Glen) and Stowe have that kind of thing, to get you from local hotels and restaurants and the like to the hill and back etc. And I recall that Steamboat Springs Colorado has something like this; shuttles from airport, hotels, ski areas.
    - NortySpock 6y ago
      Though you could regenerate part of that on the way back down. As I understand it electric cars are well suited to Denver and other mountain regions as regenerative electric braking saves on brake pad wear.
      - Pfhreak 6y ago
        You'd think so, but in practice my electric car is less efficient going over the mountains than driving a flat stretch. So yes, they will be able to recover some energy on the way down and reduce wear on brakes, but they'll have to make sure their batteries are up to the task.
        galangalalgol 6y ago
        Regen isn't 100% efficient, but its a lot better than dumping the momentum as heat. The problem is that the horizontal distance alone from denver to many destinations like lake city is enough to drain a battery.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
neogodless 6y ago
Posted just 2 minutes after the link below. EDIT My mistake - not a duplicate... below linked article is categorized under business, this one is under climate, and content is different (though related, of course!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677 "G.M.'S Electric Car Goal Blindsides Rivals and Shakes Up an Industry" Both are looking into the effects of GM's plan to take manufacturing electrical cars seriously - infrastructure and the competitive landscape.
corty 6y ago
no
ghouse 6y ago
So long as EV charging doesn't contribute to net peak on the electric grid, then yes, the grid is up to the task. The grid is designed to handle the peak hour of a ten-year period. Increasing that peak is very expensive. However, because most of the grid is fixed-cost. The marginal cost of generation is between 1/2 and 1/3 the cost of electricity. California is moving to variable electricity prices (so-called Time of Use). Electricity is more expensive between 4-9 PM when it's more expensive to provide electricity. So, if people charge their EVs when it's less expensive to do so, we'll be fine. But regulators will need to continue to align electricity price with electricity cost.
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  We don't have variable pricing for residential usage where I live but you can get a meter for home EV charging installed that does do variable pricing. From 11pm-7am, the cost is a penny per kilowatt hour, so practically free. Outside of those hours, the cost is either seven cents or twenty cents per kwh depending on the time of day and season. A 20X difference in charging cost is a pretty good incentive to plan things out so the car can be charged overnight.
  - llampx 6y ago
    /me cries in usury German electricity rates
    - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
      We also have one of the largest coal fueled electric generation plants in the world, so there's a price being paid in other ways.
- jbob2000 6y ago
  We had time of use in Ontario, but recently got rid of it. It hurts the poor more than it saves electricity. 4-9pm might be the only time I have to do laundry and cook, two of the most energy intensive tasks, if I’m working a 9-5 job that requires me to be physically present. I can’t do it during the day and sometimes I can’t do it on the weekend because of other obligations. So now I’m landed with a “tax” that I have no ability to avoid. And then you drive to Rodeo drive, where stores have their doors wide open in 100 degree heat, while their AC is on full blast, and wonder why the fuck you’re stuck paying the energy tax.
cuntrygrammar 6y ago
electrifying UPS and building infrastructure should help the cause as well
lucidguppy 6y ago
FUD?
CyanLite4 6y ago
Solar is already cost effective for charging stations. Hydrogen isn’t too far behind. Bring on the charging station infrastructure.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  I take issue with these headlines that say "X is now the cheapest energy in history!" when they mean "at noon on a sunny day in summer, completely ignoring any extra equipment and capacity needed at scale to deal with the fact that it is intermittent" Hydrogen is not an energy source but rather an energy carrier, like a battery. If you want to use hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that can exchange cells at street stations you need extra energy clean-energy capacity to make the hydrogen. There are still plenty of hurdles.
endisneigh 6y ago
It's really a shame the Chevy Volt didn't dominate like the Tesla. It's the perfect transition vehicle. I had a Smart Fortwo which was cute but had terrible range - followed by the Nissan Leaf which was better but had terrible battery life in the winter which has only been resolved recently. Tesla Model 3's are nice, but if you're an economical driver the cost per mile is still way higher than a hybrid. Ugh. EDIT: To clarify I'm referring to the total cost per mile, not just the cost to drive a mile - the Model 3 wins in that regard as far as I know. The problem is that the Model 3 costs tens of thousands of dollars more than the cheapest hybrids, so unless you're going to keep your Model 3 for like 300K miles it's not worth it on a purely economical basis. If you compare to a gas car, again on a purely economical basis, it's even more lopsided. Factor in used vehicles and even more so. I ended up just buying a used Corolla in the end sadly since it was cheaper and from my understanding more environmentally friendly. TLDR: If you want to be "environmentally friendly" that means minimizing driving. However, if you minimize driving it makes basically no sense, economically or environmentally to buy an electric car - you're better off buying a fuel efficient used vehicle. Please correct me if you believe I'm wrong in this thinking.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  How is the cost per mile higher in a Model 3 than a hybrid? As far as I know the model 3 is basically the most energy efficient EV on the market, in terms of KWh per mile. The Model 3 is lighter, more aerodynamic, and has more efficient motors.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    The parent has edited their comment, but the issue is that the sticker price on the Model 3 is still too high— you need to drive it for a super long time/distance to recoup those costs.
    - djrogers 6y ago
      Or sell it. Resale value in Tesla’s is quite high compared to a Volt.
steveBK123 6y ago
A lot of hyperbolic reporting but there’s a ton of off-peak excess overnight electricity capacity. This is also when you will tend to be charging because you are home and done driving for the day. Many utilities already offer off peak rates generally. My utility offers incentives to install an EV charger which is networked and then gives you a rebate for charging overnight after 11pm. My EV charging is barely 30% of my wintertime electric use, driving 500-800 mi/month. This is in a home with oil heat. In summertime using AC in the home, my EV usage will shrink as a percent of usage. Current solar prices keep dropping and incentives are pretty big there as well, so if you are a big EV driver you could put up some solar with a pretty quick break even of ~4 years or so. Finance it correctly and you won’t have any increase in your monthly outlays. Biggest barrier right now is simply EV cost. I love my car but EVs are still only barely price competitive after incentives/gas savings if you are a small/midsize sedan shopper. If you need something larger like a CUV/SUV/Van/Truck, EVs are only price competitive with a luxury brand/vehicle in the class.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  But off-peak usage hours will change as more and more people get cars that they charge overnight.
- thatfrenchguy 6y ago
  There is ton of overnight capacity but it’s mostly non renewables right now, which drives up your CO2 emitted per mile. We really need, in California at least, to ramp up workplace charging, otherwise we’re going to have a lot of unused solar :-/.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    While true, the plus side is EVs are still a net CO2 win even when charged by dirty fuel. As part of the same topic, I think we’re going to see PV-covered EV cars in the not too distant future; not because they don’t need charging (they’re about 10% of your instant needs on the move), but because adding PV reduces the pressure on the grid, and will significantly reduce the need to install power lines to sunlit car parks. Home, multi-storey, and hotel/motel parking will still almost certainly still need power.
Animats 6y ago
"If every American switched over to an electric passenger vehicle, ... the United States could end up using roughly 25 percent more electricity than it does today." That's not so bad. With about 15-20 years of lead time, it just means adding 2% capacity per year.
- m463 6y ago
  adding it as solar would be cheap and effective (if you have the sun). According to fueleconomy.gov a honda accord costs $1400/year in gasoline in the US. There's got to be a way to put that towards solar panels, then at some point your transportation costs (for energy) go to zero.
madhadron 6y ago
It's the peak load that's the problem, which makes the obvious thing to put in local storage substations. They draw down during peak hours and refill during off peak.
powerbroker 6y ago
Overnight (morning of 1/30/2021), the Texas grid [1] received 20,000 MW (average) of wind generated energy. If all Texas cars, or 9 million, were Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), the wind turbines (at the 20,000MW rate) would end up supplying 46% of the electricity to those cars if they plugged in last night. Now, last night was exceptionally windy. However, wind turbines generation is growing by about 10-20% annually. Accordingly, in a few years 20,000 MW overnight wind generation will become the Texas median production rate or even will fall among the lower percentiles of production. The article that the NY Times references [2] shows how the 100% electric fleet demand compares to the current daily load profiles in Texas and California. The Texas grid, as depicted, shows a peak at 3PM -- for now. However, if there were 100% EVs, that peak would shift to 3AM. Then, in addition to the typically abundant wind energy, natural gas (peaked) generators could come online to easily deliver more power. Something like 60-70% of Texas daily wind generation occurs between 9PM and 9AM, because of the diurnal wind patterns. This means that the usually strong nightly winds allows Texas to outproduce electricity at 3AM as compared to 3PM. In contrast to the habits of California EV drivers, Texas drivers get 80-90% of their annual charge needs by plugging in overnight at their homes. So, the Texas grid is uniquely suited to host a rapidly growing EV fleet. [EDIT] 9,000 MW would provide 1 kWh for 10 hrs for each car of 9,000,000 EV cars to get 30+ miles of range. So, yeah, last night the Texas grid could accommodate all of them. 1. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.html http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.htm... 2. https://theconversation.com/switching-to-electric-vehicles-could-save-the-us-billions-but-timing-is-everything-106227 https://theconversation.com/switching-to-electric-vehicles-c...
jksmith 6y ago
Expat from the grid. This is an opportunity to arbitrage energy - that is until the monopoly bans that activity. They're already banning solar panel arbitrage activities.
ogre_codes 6y ago
This change isn't happening overnight. Electrification is going to take at least 20 years, so we'll have time to figure things out. Even if all new cars are EVs in 15 years, a lot of people can't/ won't buy a new car which will drag out the transition. Also, I know a lot of people who are buying EVs are also installing solar. While it's not a perfect match for a person with a 9-5 job, it is a fantastic solution for the growing number of remote workers. This is what I am doing personally. I understand that a lot of people don't have places (or the money) where they can install solar so it's not a solution for everyone.
- cptskippy 6y ago
  Peak energy demand is 4-9pm when people arrive home from work in the evening, turn on HVAC, start cooking, watch tv, and basically use power. That is after solar production tapers off, so solar without batteries doesn't help the grid. Most EVs and many chargers can be programmed to charge at set times. So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest. This will actually help the grid because today power companies have to throttle up and down production to meet peak demand then overnight lull. By charging EVs at night it will allow production to remain pretty consistent. Another factor no one seems to get is that people aren't going to charge nightly. This is like making the argument that our gasoline grid isn't capable of refueling every car simultaneously.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    I think there is a lot more flex in EV charging than people give credit for. As an easy example, power companies could offer people discounts for putting their car charger on a digital control which only allows charging when there is surplus power. They do this with AC units. > So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest. As more and more solar comes online, this is becoming less true. It may be beneficial to charge during daylight hours in the summer time. A lot of this is regional too.
    - cptskippy 6y ago
      That's true, it might even become a necessity in order to save the grid from solar proliferation overloading the grid. I think that battery is going to become as important as solar to the future grid. Battery allows you to timeshift demand and could allow power companies to operate plants at a constant rate rather than throttling up and down. As renewables displace fossils, batteries will play even more important a role. We got solar + batteries in late November and it's been an interesting experience. We're on time-of-use billing to the batteries have allowed us to completely avoid peak charges.
dghughes 6y ago
This reminds me of my elderly parent's home 50+ years old, original 100A service and wiring, glass fuses. Built in a time when electrical devices were; washer, dryer, fridge, stove, TV, furnace, lights. All 15A 120V except for the stove at 30A 240V. Probably four circuits for the entire house. All homes on their street have electrical service entering from the opposite side of the driveway. So if they wanted a car charger the house would have to be rewired, service upgraded. Electric vehicles are for the young and rich.
- sib 6y ago
  Yup - this is very common in southern California, for example. My mother-in-law and brother-in-law's homes are both in this situation. Ours would also have been except we were lucky that the previous owner was an EV early adopter and when he did a big remodeling project, he upgraded the service panel. (We then added solar when we moved in...)
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  Knob and tube wiring is outdated and very dangerous. This article is about the grid in general, not your parents' ancient fuses. 240V 30A is over 7kw. Even a 15A 120V is enough to charge a typical electric car.
  - blabitty 6y ago
    The grid in general has a lot of old wiring especially in earlier settled parts of the country. I grew up in a house built in 1940 and it wasn't especially old for my area. These are real costs that affect real people when discussing a massive paradigm shift like going mainly to EV and comments like yours perpetuate the idea that EV's are for a certain wealthy disconnected from reality virtue signalling crowd.
    - smileysteve 6y ago
      Overdue maintenance for real people. Cloth and/or ungrounded wiring is a electrocution and fire hazard and should be considered unsafe for anybody using basic electrics near any water source, much more if it has any load. This warning should be more pronounced for elderly, children, or people who have not been accustomed to it. This is not much different than the Lowndes Al homes that haven't had working septic in 30 years that are bringing back hookworm.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
The main challenge is not so much generating more energy but dealing with the notion of many TWH of battery capacity being plugged into the grid and leveraging that. Which at face value would be part of the solution except it isn't. That would be too easy. The real challenge is dealing with 2 orders magnitude of magnitude drop in price per kwh for the grid and the consequences that has for demand. Hint: it will sky rocket; the projected demand for charging cars is peanuts compared to that. People have trouble dealing with exponentials; they lack the imagination. But the fact is, we're about to see an orders of magnitude shift in prices and capacity when it comes to energy production. If you are thinking in terms of the current supply and demand, you're basically off by magnitudes. Our very near future is this market being disrupted to the extreme. An EV is basically a big battery with plenty of capacity for soaking up excess energy during off-peak hours and delivering back to the grid during peak hours. So, you could be deceived into thinking that the challenge is simply infrastructure for leveraging this capacity. People are actually working on this and it's not particularly hard from a technical point of view. For reference, most grid battery being installed currently is still sub GWH. Anything over a few hundred MWH is considered news worthy. A Tesla has about 60kwh. A million of those is 60GWH; that's some serious capacity. There are about a quarter billion cars in the US; or about the equivalent of 12.5 TWH if we set the average EV battery to 50KWH and they would all be converted to electric. The US produces about 4000 TWH of energy every year (a bit over) currently; so 12.5 TWH of battery that can be charged/discharged in hours, is a lot of capacity. Arguably much more than actually needed (currently). So plug that in, and problem solved. Of course, that's not the solution to this challenge but a very narrow tunnel vision of a hypothetical part of the solution (involving just car batteries). It will never happen because it won't be economical. In reality, there will be mass deployment of wind, solar, and all sorts of grid energy storage that is probably a lot more cost effective than car optimized lithium ion batteries. Companies will be producing this as fast as they can for the foreseeable future and it will be like printing money in terms of business opportunity. Basically demand will be insatiable for the foreseeable future. The lower the prices get, the higher the demand and there is not enough supply as it is so prices are pretty good. We have decades to crack this nut; so charging cars is going to be a complete and utter non issue by the time all those quarter billion cars have converted (2040-2050 timeframe). But the flip side is that operating the remaining ICE vehicles will have become uneconomical long before that (about 5 years from now). So, people will be buying EVs at a premium just to get in on the action of lowering their cost for the foreseeable future. If you can afford it; great but lots of people will be burning cash (quite literally) for some time to come because they can't. Actually, when everybody finally has converted, energy prices will have dropped so low that the upside of renting out your car battery for grid support won't be worth the trouble unless you can do it at scale. It makes sense at today's prices but with a few decades of improvements in cost and efficiency it won't; not even close. This is the bit people struggle with. Energy is expensive currently and people assume this will remain true. The lesson of the past decade is that solar went from being 100x more expensive to being the cheapest option. It's not done dropping in price unless you happen to suffer from extreme pessimism regarding scientific and industrial progress on this front in the next decades. This being HN, I assume you are not that foolish. IMHO the only debate worth having right now is on the number of orders of magnitude we are talking. I worry about being too conservative here. With solar and wind, the cost of energy is basically a function of the purchase cost of the infrastructure and how long it will keep mining energy from the sun/atmosphere (for absolutely nothing whatsoever). Current equipment is rated for decades of use. So, as that stuff gets cheaper and better, the $ per kwh will continue dropping to the point where it is no longer interesting for consumers to worry about such mundane things as efficiency or price per kwh. When a GWH is basically a dollar, why bother renting out your car battery for pennies? It doesn't make sense. When the equipment needed to generate a lifetime supply of energy for the vehicle is a fraction of its purchase price, why even think of it as variable cost? Charging a Tesla at grid prices currently costs you about the price of a cup of coffee (maybe plus a cheap lunch if you use a supercharger, which of course you won't most of the time). That's right now at rates that are basically reflecting the old expensive coal+gas+nuclear world we are still in. It's a hard sell as it is to spend a lot of time and energy monetizing that. Imagine that dropping by 100x. That's roughly what is going to play out over the next few decades. Any math involving today's prices is basically going to be wrong by orders of magintude. That's the real challenge for grid suppliers: surviving in a world where most of their current infrastructure is obsolete and about 100x more expensive than the market rate for energy. It's going to be brutal if you are in that line of business unless you keep up. If your business is burning coal, your life is going to suck. But good riddance. The challenge for grid operators is continuing to function in that world. It will involve aggressively investing in renewables + cheap storage + transport (aka. wires) just to stay in business. That's basically what they are doing. Some more so than others. Investors already moved their money.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/VPPWW https://archive.is/VPPWW
dang 6y ago
There's another NYT electric car thread happening at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677. Which article is more interesting?
exabrial 6y ago
I have no doubts the transmission grid is up to the task, but ironically you'll run into the "last mile" problem on the distribution side. A lot of homes from the 60s-70s in my area only have 100a-125a 2-Phase service. That's quite inadequate do get a meaningful charge quickly. It stinks that 3-phase is really only available to commercial areas.
- kgermino 6y ago
  Isn’t most residential charging done at 30amps? That’s enough to charge a car to full in a few hours and should be available in almost any house with 100 amp service a that doesn’t use electric heat.
  - beervirus 6y ago
    The Tesla wall charger can draw 48 amps if you let it. 30 amps isn’t bad, and it’ll charge a car to full.. not in a few hours, but overnight.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  It's not 2-phase. It's split phase. But you can think of it as being 2-phase to make the math convenient.
  - exabrial 6y ago
    It's technically singe phase with a center tap if you want to be ultra pedantic :)
Ekaros 6y ago
On large scale building new power plants and transmission lines is pretty simple. But I think the real challenge will be for the last km. It's a nice idea to add the charger to lamppost and so on. But how do we cope with increased demand there then? We are talking about dozens or hundreds of extra kilowatts of demand compared to current. And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Even bigger problem in places where people commute to, with potential of hundreds of kilowatts of extra demand in relatively short window of time...
- axaxs 6y ago
  Where I lived, virtually every big parking lot had charging stations. As big parking lots are generally wasted space anyways, why not work with them to be the place to charge? Just as I don't gas up at home, I can live with not charging at home, especially as charge times come down in the future.
  - Ekaros 6y ago
    Doesn't solve the issue of how electricity gets to those charging stations. Specially when there will be dozens of them in that big parking lot. Grid basically works with electricity being produced in large plant, then it's voltage is raised for long distance transmission, at other end it is lowered in stages. And all of these stages have limited capacity of how much electricity can pass through them. And there isn't too much extra in these as that would cost more. So it's a big thing to build up...
    - axaxs 6y ago
      True, but any consolidation helps the 'last x' problem, generally. Instead of worrying if every house can charge at once, you only have to worry about the shopping centers. It doesn't help at the power station level though of course.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Is this true? Distribution lines are obviously run with demand in mind, but I wouldn't be shocked if utilities ran last mile lines with copper that's twice as thick as it needed to be because they optimistically projected future demand, copper was cheap, and they didn't want to come back and run more lines.
firebaze 6y ago
It'd be wise to calculate for yourself. Existing and future green energy plants (solar/wind/water) won't be enough to charge 60% EV's in 10 years without nuclear or fossil backup, if all current oil-based traffic was now using EVs. But as soon as you start generating energy for EVs from fossil fuel, the CO² balance reverses due to an even lower efficiency factor than combustion in modern ICEs. Either we accept nuclear energy as "clean" and massively stock up in this area (also investing massively in next generation nuclear, like fusion power), or we'll face a huge backlash in a few years. Or we invent a next-generation battery which is cheap enough (on resources) and improve upon existing energy storage by at least one order of magnitude. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/12/f69/GITT%20ISATT%20EVs%20at%20Scale%20Grid%20Summary%20Report%20FINAL%20Nov2019.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/12/f69/GITT%20I...
- est31 6y ago
  We are only at the beginning of the S-curve of renewable adoption. The US is particularly well suited for this due to its large area. Furthermore, you can capture the CO2 of a the fossil based electric plant way more easily than putting all this machinery into each and every car. Retrofitting filters etc. is also way easier than telling your voters to buy new cars with better filters.
  - firebaze 6y ago
    Economy of scale is important, definitely. I'm just not so sure if the economy of scale favors energy storage (required for large-scale EVs) or ICEs right now, or in the forseeable future if we don't heavily invest in backup energy if renewables are not available. The US is heavily dependent on air conditioning, for example. What would happen if the available energy was low in summer nights? Some kind of base energy backup needs to be there, and the energy cost of air conditioning alone is huge.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      You do realize that people need less air conditioning at night and that this is something that works now and has worked for a long time right? This isn't some theoretical plan, people have been using air conditioning for a long time.
mulmen 6y ago
Ah the rare exception to Betteridge’s law of headlines.
nickik 6y ago
I actually think the biggest engineering issue is gone be truck stops. Large truck stops that have 100+ trucks wanting to charge at the same time is gone be an issue. I don't have a good understanding of the grid, but I have heard that if more and more cars go from 400V to 800V+ that could cause issues in cities as well, but I don't understand it technically. How many cars will actually go to high voltage architecture is not clear yet.
paul7986 6y ago
They are ... the only one worth buying that makes sense is a Telsa in terms of being able to charge it on road trips. That can be tricky too if you want to make it to your 700 mile destination the quickest driving a car. If you have a Volt or a Leaf can you use a Telsa charger?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
olliej 6y ago
As a person who lives in California: is the nation’s grid ready for today’s usage? PG&E would indicate that the answer is no
socialdemocrat 6y ago
I am a bit surprised by why such articles are written without taking at least a glance at other countries which have been through this. Over 50% of annually sold cars in Norway are electric. About 10% of the cars on the roads are now electric in Norway. Most of the things the US is going to go through we have already been through. You can look at how we dealt with things such as charging at apartments. I live in an apartment in Norway so this was indeed an issue when I first inquired about getting an EV. Eventually however they started doing upgrades allowing us to connect multiple chargers in the garages. We have not experience problems with the grid but I am also of the impression that our grid is newer than what is common in the US. The biggest problem is the shared chargers. People get angry about inconsiderate drivers hogging a charging spot for too long. Also service for EVs is under heavy load.
- csours 6y ago
  Norway has extraordinary levels of renewable energy.
  - socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Yeah, but that is kind of irrelevant with respect to how the grid operates. Norway doesn't have 25% energy sitting there unused, ready for EVs. Quite the contrary, Norway uses pretty much all of its power. Norway's economy is built around it. We have a lot of really power hungry industry developed here over many years due to access to large amounts of cheap electric power. In fact there is a battle over building wind turbines in Norway now, because we need them to cover higher future electricity demand from EVs. And of course nobody wants them in their backyard.
- jakewins 6y ago
  Let me try to invert your point in the other direction. Imagine that, rather than having walkable cities, every Norwegian commuted alone by car for one hour every day. Imagine - and having lived in Scandinavia for many years, I know this is hard - that there is no grocery store within any reasonable biking or walking distance. Imagine an 8-hour drive is a normal weekend thing to do, because there is no working train infrastructure. In this version of Norway, every single Norwegian would own at least one car. Generally you own multiple cars, because if your one car goes to the shop, you cannot leave your house - it would take hours to walk or bike to work! This version of Norway, as you can imagine, has way, way way more cars. Specifically, roughly twice as many (~400 cars per 1000 Norwegians vs ~800 cars per 1000 Americans). And they drive, way, way way more miles per year. When you combine the much higher number of vehicles in America with the much higher number of annual miles driven, the American challenge, in kWh added to the grid, is perhaps 4-5 times the size of the Norwegian one. Not to mention that, in Norway there is a single grid maintained by a single operator working in lock-step with the national governments climate priorities. In America there are three grids managed by nine regional operators that all hate each other in various fascinating ways. All to say. There are definitely lessons, but Americas relationship to cars makes the "Norway can ramp car sales to 50% BEV why can't you" argument misplaced. It's like arguing that since the US grid adds, per quarter, twice as many BEVs as the Norwegian grid adds per year, why can't Norway take some pointers from the US? Well, because that's a silly comparison.
Proven 6y ago
Even better if the grid is NOT up to it - that's the whole point - look for additional ways more budget must be spent, as the US government, socialists and kleptocracy work together on destroying the republic and the US dollar.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
EV cars will get there and so too the infrastructure but it isn't there yet. Americans like big vehicles. This is solely lacking in the electric department. Americans also like convenience - no matter how many ways you try to slice and dice the argument it's less convenient right now. When EVs get bigger (more utility) and have longer charge and shorter charging time, they will take off. It just isn't there yet.
kgc 6y ago
Time for Tesla Powerwalls.
Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
This is maybe not the ideal place for this, but has the analysis been done to confirm that EVs are going to be a net positive for the environment? I have a lot of concerns stemming from the mining needed to secure the materials to make all these batteries. And the entire transportation sector is only responsible for 28% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the US, according to the latest data I could find. Would be happy to be have my concerns assuaged.

yes

ChrisIsTaken 6y ago
Yeah, most people are recharging 20-30 miles of daily driving not the whole battery. As long as the car pulls its 10-15 kWh overnight before it leaves the garage in the morning EV owners aren't going to care when charging happens. With managed charging / demand response and day ahead weather forecasting you'd rarely need to spin up a gas turbine. On the coasts wind is strongest at night, the distribution grid is at minimum load and cars are parked. Seems like a perfect match.
- galangalalgol 6y ago
  Someone should probably check areas like denver where everyone will pack up and head a full charge into the mountains every weekend.
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    How many is "everyone"? All of your friends and acquaintances or literally 100% of the population?
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Given the shitshow that I've heard that highway is, you'd think someone would have developed an economical public transit option specifically for skiers / mountain rec. Whenever I look into this kind of thing when I plan ski vacations I find the bussing options outrageously priced (for example from Calgary to Banff or Kelowna to Revelstoke, etc.) and it ends up being more economical for a family to simply rent a car. Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas, apparently. And much of the alps is accessed this way (tho in general European travel by rail is much more of a thing)
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas I'm guessing you probably still needed transportation of some sort from the train stations to the mountains. One of the issues with just having a bus is that a lot of ski resorts have multiple base areas and most of the lodging and eating options are off-mountain. Some are pretty self-contained but the layout for resorts in the northeast for example pretty much presupposes that you have a car if you're going for a weekend. There are self-contained exceptions of course but many aren't.
      - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
        A few ski area towns in Vermont actually still have their own local transit. I know at least Waitsfield (Sugarbush / Mt Elln & Mad River Glen) and Stowe have that kind of thing, to get you from local hotels and restaurants and the like to the hill and back etc. And I recall that Steamboat Springs Colorado has something like this; shuttles from airport, hotels, ski areas.
  - NortySpock 6y ago
    Though you could regenerate part of that on the way back down. As I understand it electric cars are well suited to Denver and other mountain regions as regenerative electric braking saves on brake pad wear.
    - Pfhreak 6y ago
      You'd think so, but in practice my electric car is less efficient going over the mountains than driving a flat stretch. So yes, they will be able to recover some energy on the way down and reduce wear on brakes, but they'll have to make sure their batteries are up to the task.
      - galangalalgol 6y ago
        Regen isn't 100% efficient, but its a lot better than dumping the momentum as heat. The problem is that the horizontal distance alone from denver to many destinations like lake city is enough to drain a battery.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Posted just 2 minutes after the link below. EDIT My mistake - not a duplicate... below linked article is categorized under business, this one is under climate, and content is different (though related, of course!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677 "G.M.'S Electric Car Goal Blindsides Rivals and Shakes Up an Industry" Both are looking into the effects of GM's plan to take manufacturing electrical cars seriously - infrastructure and the competitive landscape.

corty 6y ago

ghouse 6y ago

So long as EV charging doesn't contribute to net peak on the electric grid, then yes, the grid is up to the task. The grid is designed to handle the peak hour of a ten-year period. Increasing that peak is very expensive. However, because most of the grid is fixed-cost. The marginal cost of generation is between 1/2 and 1/3 the cost of electricity. California is moving to variable electricity prices (so-called Time of Use). Electricity is more expensive between 4-9 PM when it's more expensive to provide electricity. So, if people charge their EVs when it's less expensive to do so, we'll be fine. But regulators will need to continue to align electricity price with electricity cost.

Mountain_Skies 6y ago
We don't have variable pricing for residential usage where I live but you can get a meter for home EV charging installed that does do variable pricing. From 11pm-7am, the cost is a penny per kilowatt hour, so practically free. Outside of those hours, the cost is either seven cents or twenty cents per kwh depending on the time of day and season. A 20X difference in charging cost is a pretty good incentive to plan things out so the car can be charged overnight.
- llampx 6y ago
  /me cries in usury German electricity rates
  - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    We also have one of the largest coal fueled electric generation plants in the world, so there's a price being paid in other ways.
jbob2000 6y ago
We had time of use in Ontario, but recently got rid of it. It hurts the poor more than it saves electricity. 4-9pm might be the only time I have to do laundry and cook, two of the most energy intensive tasks, if I’m working a 9-5 job that requires me to be physically present. I can’t do it during the day and sometimes I can’t do it on the weekend because of other obligations. So now I’m landed with a “tax” that I have no ability to avoid. And then you drive to Rodeo drive, where stores have their doors wide open in 100 degree heat, while their AC is on full blast, and wonder why the fuck you’re stuck paying the energy tax.

cuntrygrammar 6y ago

electrifying UPS and building infrastructure should help the cause as well

lucidguppy 6y ago

FUD?

CyanLite4 6y ago

Solar is already cost effective for charging stations. Hydrogen isn’t too far behind. Bring on the charging station infrastructure.

acidburnNSA 6y ago
I take issue with these headlines that say "X is now the cheapest energy in history!" when they mean "at noon on a sunny day in summer, completely ignoring any extra equipment and capacity needed at scale to deal with the fact that it is intermittent" Hydrogen is not an energy source but rather an energy carrier, like a battery. If you want to use hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that can exchange cells at street stations you need extra energy clean-energy capacity to make the hydrogen. There are still plenty of hurdles.

endisneigh 6y ago

It's really a shame the Chevy Volt didn't dominate like the Tesla. It's the perfect transition vehicle. I had a Smart Fortwo which was cute but had terrible range - followed by the Nissan Leaf which was better but had terrible battery life in the winter which has only been resolved recently. Tesla Model 3's are nice, but if you're an economical driver the cost per mile is still way higher than a hybrid. Ugh. EDIT: To clarify I'm referring to the total cost per mile, not just the cost to drive a mile - the Model 3 wins in that regard as far as I know. The problem is that the Model 3 costs tens of thousands of dollars more than the cheapest hybrids, so unless you're going to keep your Model 3 for like 300K miles it's not worth it on a purely economical basis. If you compare to a gas car, again on a purely economical basis, it's even more lopsided. Factor in used vehicles and even more so. I ended up just buying a used Corolla in the end sadly since it was cheaper and from my understanding more environmentally friendly. TLDR: If you want to be "environmentally friendly" that means minimizing driving. However, if you minimize driving it makes basically no sense, economically or environmentally to buy an electric car - you're better off buying a fuel efficient used vehicle. Please correct me if you believe I'm wrong in this thinking.

tachyonbeam 6y ago
How is the cost per mile higher in a Model 3 than a hybrid? As far as I know the model 3 is basically the most energy efficient EV on the market, in terms of KWh per mile. The Model 3 is lighter, more aerodynamic, and has more efficient motors.
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  The parent has edited their comment, but the issue is that the sticker price on the Model 3 is still too high— you need to drive it for a super long time/distance to recoup those costs.
  - djrogers 6y ago
    Or sell it. Resale value in Tesla’s is quite high compared to a Volt.

steveBK123 6y ago

A lot of hyperbolic reporting but there’s a ton of off-peak excess overnight electricity capacity. This is also when you will tend to be charging because you are home and done driving for the day. Many utilities already offer off peak rates generally. My utility offers incentives to install an EV charger which is networked and then gives you a rebate for charging overnight after 11pm. My EV charging is barely 30% of my wintertime electric use, driving 500-800 mi/month. This is in a home with oil heat. In summertime using AC in the home, my EV usage will shrink as a percent of usage. Current solar prices keep dropping and incentives are pretty big there as well, so if you are a big EV driver you could put up some solar with a pretty quick break even of ~4 years or so. Finance it correctly and you won’t have any increase in your monthly outlays. Biggest barrier right now is simply EV cost. I love my car but EVs are still only barely price competitive after incentives/gas savings if you are a small/midsize sedan shopper. If you need something larger like a CUV/SUV/Van/Truck, EVs are only price competitive with a luxury brand/vehicle in the class.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
But off-peak usage hours will change as more and more people get cars that they charge overnight.
thatfrenchguy 6y ago
There is ton of overnight capacity but it’s mostly non renewables right now, which drives up your CO2 emitted per mile. We really need, in California at least, to ramp up workplace charging, otherwise we’re going to have a lot of unused solar :-/.
- ben_w 6y ago
  While true, the plus side is EVs are still a net CO2 win even when charged by dirty fuel. As part of the same topic, I think we’re going to see PV-covered EV cars in the not too distant future; not because they don’t need charging (they’re about 10% of your instant needs on the move), but because adding PV reduces the pressure on the grid, and will significantly reduce the need to install power lines to sunlit car parks. Home, multi-storey, and hotel/motel parking will still almost certainly still need power.

Animats 6y ago

"If every American switched over to an electric passenger vehicle, ... the United States could end up using roughly 25 percent more electricity than it does today." That's not so bad. With about 15-20 years of lead time, it just means adding 2% capacity per year.

m463 6y ago
adding it as solar would be cheap and effective (if you have the sun). According to fueleconomy.gov a honda accord costs $1400/year in gasoline in the US. There's got to be a way to put that towards solar panels, then at some point your transportation costs (for energy) go to zero.

madhadron 6y ago

It's the peak load that's the problem, which makes the obvious thing to put in local storage substations. They draw down during peak hours and refill during off peak.

powerbroker 6y ago

Overnight (morning of 1/30/2021), the Texas grid [1] received 20,000 MW (average) of wind generated energy. If all Texas cars, or 9 million, were Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV), the wind turbines (at the 20,000MW rate) would end up supplying 46% of the electricity to those cars if they plugged in last night. Now, last night was exceptionally windy. However, wind turbines generation is growing by about 10-20% annually. Accordingly, in a few years 20,000 MW overnight wind generation will become the Texas median production rate or even will fall among the lower percentiles of production. The article that the NY Times references [2] shows how the 100% electric fleet demand compares to the current daily load profiles in Texas and California. The Texas grid, as depicted, shows a peak at 3PM -- for now. However, if there were 100% EVs, that peak would shift to 3AM. Then, in addition to the typically abundant wind energy, natural gas (peaked) generators could come online to easily deliver more power. Something like 60-70% of Texas daily wind generation occurs between 9PM and 9AM, because of the diurnal wind patterns. This means that the usually strong nightly winds allows Texas to outproduce electricity at 3AM as compared to 3PM. In contrast to the habits of California EV drivers, Texas drivers get 80-90% of their annual charge needs by plugging in overnight at their homes. So, the Texas grid is uniquely suited to host a rapidly growing EV fleet. [EDIT] 9,000 MW would provide 1 kWh for 10 hrs for each car of 9,000,000 EV cars to get 30+ miles of range. So, yeah, last night the Texas grid could accommodate all of them. 1. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.html http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.htm... 2. https://theconversation.com/switching-to-electric-vehicles-could-save-the-us-billions-but-timing-is-everything-106227 https://theconversation.com/switching-to-electric-vehicles-c...

jksmith 6y ago

Expat from the grid. This is an opportunity to arbitrage energy - that is until the monopoly bans that activity. They're already banning solar panel arbitrage activities.

ogre_codes 6y ago

This change isn't happening overnight. Electrification is going to take at least 20 years, so we'll have time to figure things out. Even if all new cars are EVs in 15 years, a lot of people can't/ won't buy a new car which will drag out the transition. Also, I know a lot of people who are buying EVs are also installing solar. While it's not a perfect match for a person with a 9-5 job, it is a fantastic solution for the growing number of remote workers. This is what I am doing personally. I understand that a lot of people don't have places (or the money) where they can install solar so it's not a solution for everyone.

cptskippy 6y ago
Peak energy demand is 4-9pm when people arrive home from work in the evening, turn on HVAC, start cooking, watch tv, and basically use power. That is after solar production tapers off, so solar without batteries doesn't help the grid. Most EVs and many chargers can be programmed to charge at set times. So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest. This will actually help the grid because today power companies have to throttle up and down production to meet peak demand then overnight lull. By charging EVs at night it will allow production to remain pretty consistent. Another factor no one seems to get is that people aren't going to charge nightly. This is like making the argument that our gasoline grid isn't capable of refueling every car simultaneously.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I think there is a lot more flex in EV charging than people give credit for. As an easy example, power companies could offer people discounts for putting their car charger on a digital control which only allows charging when there is surplus power. They do this with AC units. > So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest. As more and more solar comes online, this is becoming less true. It may be beneficial to charge during daylight hours in the summer time. A lot of this is regional too.
  - cptskippy 6y ago
    That's true, it might even become a necessity in order to save the grid from solar proliferation overloading the grid. I think that battery is going to become as important as solar to the future grid. Battery allows you to timeshift demand and could allow power companies to operate plants at a constant rate rather than throttling up and down. As renewables displace fossils, batteries will play even more important a role. We got solar + batteries in late November and it's been an interesting experience. We're on time-of-use billing to the batteries have allowed us to completely avoid peak charges.

dghughes 6y ago

This reminds me of my elderly parent's home 50+ years old, original 100A service and wiring, glass fuses. Built in a time when electrical devices were; washer, dryer, fridge, stove, TV, furnace, lights. All 15A 120V except for the stove at 30A 240V. Probably four circuits for the entire house. All homes on their street have electrical service entering from the opposite side of the driveway. So if they wanted a car charger the house would have to be rewired, service upgraded. Electric vehicles are for the young and rich.

sib 6y ago
Yup - this is very common in southern California, for example. My mother-in-law and brother-in-law's homes are both in this situation. Ours would also have been except we were lucky that the previous owner was an EV early adopter and when he did a big remodeling project, he upgraded the service panel. (We then added solar when we moved in...)
CyberDildonics 6y ago
Knob and tube wiring is outdated and very dangerous. This article is about the grid in general, not your parents' ancient fuses. 240V 30A is over 7kw. Even a 15A 120V is enough to charge a typical electric car.
- blabitty 6y ago
  The grid in general has a lot of old wiring especially in earlier settled parts of the country. I grew up in a house built in 1940 and it wasn't especially old for my area. These are real costs that affect real people when discussing a massive paradigm shift like going mainly to EV and comments like yours perpetuate the idea that EV's are for a certain wealthy disconnected from reality virtue signalling crowd.
  - smileysteve 6y ago
    Overdue maintenance for real people. Cloth and/or ungrounded wiring is a electrocution and fire hazard and should be considered unsafe for anybody using basic electrics near any water source, much more if it has any load. This warning should be more pronounced for elderly, children, or people who have not been accustomed to it. This is not much different than the Lowndes Al homes that haven't had working septic in 30 years that are bringing back hookworm.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

The main challenge is not so much generating more energy but dealing with the notion of many TWH of battery capacity being plugged into the grid and leveraging that. Which at face value would be part of the solution except it isn't. That would be too easy. The real challenge is dealing with 2 orders magnitude of magnitude drop in price per kwh for the grid and the consequences that has for demand. Hint: it will sky rocket; the projected demand for charging cars is peanuts compared to that. People have trouble dealing with exponentials; they lack the imagination. But the fact is, we're about to see an orders of magnitude shift in prices and capacity when it comes to energy production. If you are thinking in terms of the current supply and demand, you're basically off by magnitudes. Our very near future is this market being disrupted to the extreme. An EV is basically a big battery with plenty of capacity for soaking up excess energy during off-peak hours and delivering back to the grid during peak hours. So, you could be deceived into thinking that the challenge is simply infrastructure for leveraging this capacity. People are actually working on this and it's not particularly hard from a technical point of view. For reference, most grid battery being installed currently is still sub GWH. Anything over a few hundred MWH is considered news worthy. A Tesla has about 60kwh. A million of those is 60GWH; that's some serious capacity. There are about a quarter billion cars in the US; or about the equivalent of 12.5 TWH if we set the average EV battery to 50KWH and they would all be converted to electric. The US produces about 4000 TWH of energy every year (a bit over) currently; so 12.5 TWH of battery that can be charged/discharged in hours, is a lot of capacity. Arguably much more than actually needed (currently). So plug that in, and problem solved. Of course, that's not the solution to this challenge but a very narrow tunnel vision of a hypothetical part of the solution (involving just car batteries). It will never happen because it won't be economical. In reality, there will be mass deployment of wind, solar, and all sorts of grid energy storage that is probably a lot more cost effective than car optimized lithium ion batteries. Companies will be producing this as fast as they can for the foreseeable future and it will be like printing money in terms of business opportunity. Basically demand will be insatiable for the foreseeable future. The lower the prices get, the higher the demand and there is not enough supply as it is so prices are pretty good. We have decades to crack this nut; so charging cars is going to be a complete and utter non issue by the time all those quarter billion cars have converted (2040-2050 timeframe). But the flip side is that operating the remaining ICE vehicles will have become uneconomical long before that (about 5 years from now). So, people will be buying EVs at a premium just to get in on the action of lowering their cost for the foreseeable future. If you can afford it; great but lots of people will be burning cash (quite literally) for some time to come because they can't. Actually, when everybody finally has converted, energy prices will have dropped so low that the upside of renting out your car battery for grid support won't be worth the trouble unless you can do it at scale. It makes sense at today's prices but with a few decades of improvements in cost and efficiency it won't; not even close. This is the bit people struggle with. Energy is expensive currently and people assume this will remain true. The lesson of the past decade is that solar went from being 100x more expensive to being the cheapest option. It's not done dropping in price unless you happen to suffer from extreme pessimism regarding scientific and industrial progress on this front in the next decades. This being HN, I assume you are not that foolish. IMHO the only debate worth having right now is on the number of orders of magnitude we are talking. I worry about being too conservative here. With solar and wind, the cost of energy is basically a function of the purchase cost of the infrastructure and how long it will keep mining energy from the sun/atmosphere (for absolutely nothing whatsoever). Current equipment is rated for decades of use. So, as that stuff gets cheaper and better, the $ per kwh will continue dropping to the point where it is no longer interesting for consumers to worry about such mundane things as efficiency or price per kwh. When a GWH is basically a dollar, why bother renting out your car battery for pennies? It doesn't make sense. When the equipment needed to generate a lifetime supply of energy for the vehicle is a fraction of its purchase price, why even think of it as variable cost? Charging a Tesla at grid prices currently costs you about the price of a cup of coffee (maybe plus a cheap lunch if you use a supercharger, which of course you won't most of the time). That's right now at rates that are basically reflecting the old expensive coal+gas+nuclear world we are still in. It's a hard sell as it is to spend a lot of time and energy monetizing that. Imagine that dropping by 100x. That's roughly what is going to play out over the next few decades. Any math involving today's prices is basically going to be wrong by orders of magintude. That's the real challenge for grid suppliers: surviving in a world where most of their current infrastructure is obsolete and about 100x more expensive than the market rate for energy. It's going to be brutal if you are in that line of business unless you keep up. If your business is burning coal, your life is going to suck. But good riddance. The challenge for grid operators is continuing to function in that world. It will involve aggressively investing in renewables + cheap storage + transport (aka. wires) just to stay in business. That's basically what they are doing. Some more so than others. Investors already moved their money.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/VPPWW https://archive.is/VPPWW

dang 6y ago

There's another NYT electric car thread happening at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677. Which article is more interesting?

exabrial 6y ago

I have no doubts the transmission grid is up to the task, but ironically you'll run into the "last mile" problem on the distribution side. A lot of homes from the 60s-70s in my area only have 100a-125a 2-Phase service. That's quite inadequate do get a meaningful charge quickly. It stinks that 3-phase is really only available to commercial areas.

kgermino 6y ago
Isn’t most residential charging done at 30amps? That’s enough to charge a car to full in a few hours and should be available in almost any house with 100 amp service a that doesn’t use electric heat.
- beervirus 6y ago
  The Tesla wall charger can draw 48 amps if you let it. 30 amps isn’t bad, and it’ll charge a car to full.. not in a few hours, but overnight.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
It's not 2-phase. It's split phase. But you can think of it as being 2-phase to make the math convenient.
- exabrial 6y ago
  It's technically singe phase with a center tap if you want to be ultra pedantic :)

Ekaros 6y ago

On large scale building new power plants and transmission lines is pretty simple. But I think the real challenge will be for the last km. It's a nice idea to add the charger to lamppost and so on. But how do we cope with increased demand there then? We are talking about dozens or hundreds of extra kilowatts of demand compared to current. And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Even bigger problem in places where people commute to, with potential of hundreds of kilowatts of extra demand in relatively short window of time...

axaxs 6y ago
Where I lived, virtually every big parking lot had charging stations. As big parking lots are generally wasted space anyways, why not work with them to be the place to charge? Just as I don't gas up at home, I can live with not charging at home, especially as charge times come down in the future.
- Ekaros 6y ago
  Doesn't solve the issue of how electricity gets to those charging stations. Specially when there will be dozens of them in that big parking lot. Grid basically works with electricity being produced in large plant, then it's voltage is raised for long distance transmission, at other end it is lowered in stages. And all of these stages have limited capacity of how much electricity can pass through them. And there isn't too much extra in these as that would cost more. So it's a big thing to build up...
  - axaxs 6y ago
    True, but any consolidation helps the 'last x' problem, generally. Instead of worrying if every house can charge at once, you only have to worry about the shopping centers. It doesn't help at the power station level though of course.
dehrmann 6y ago
> And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Is this true? Distribution lines are obviously run with demand in mind, but I wouldn't be shocked if utilities ran last mile lines with copper that's twice as thick as it needed to be because they optimistically projected future demand, copper was cheap, and they didn't want to come back and run more lines.

firebaze 6y ago

It'd be wise to calculate for yourself. Existing and future green energy plants (solar/wind/water) won't be enough to charge 60% EV's in 10 years without nuclear or fossil backup, if all current oil-based traffic was now using EVs. But as soon as you start generating energy for EVs from fossil fuel, the CO² balance reverses due to an even lower efficiency factor than combustion in modern ICEs. Either we accept nuclear energy as "clean" and massively stock up in this area (also investing massively in next generation nuclear, like fusion power), or we'll face a huge backlash in a few years. Or we invent a next-generation battery which is cheap enough (on resources) and improve upon existing energy storage by at least one order of magnitude. https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/12/f69/GITT%20ISATT%20EVs%20at%20Scale%20Grid%20Summary%20Report%20FINAL%20Nov2019.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/12/f69/GITT%20I...

est31 6y ago
We are only at the beginning of the S-curve of renewable adoption. The US is particularly well suited for this due to its large area. Furthermore, you can capture the CO2 of a the fossil based electric plant way more easily than putting all this machinery into each and every car. Retrofitting filters etc. is also way easier than telling your voters to buy new cars with better filters.
- firebaze 6y ago
  Economy of scale is important, definitely. I'm just not so sure if the economy of scale favors energy storage (required for large-scale EVs) or ICEs right now, or in the forseeable future if we don't heavily invest in backup energy if renewables are not available. The US is heavily dependent on air conditioning, for example. What would happen if the available energy was low in summer nights? Some kind of base energy backup needs to be there, and the energy cost of air conditioning alone is huge.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    You do realize that people need less air conditioning at night and that this is something that works now and has worked for a long time right? This isn't some theoretical plan, people have been using air conditioning for a long time.

mulmen 6y ago

Ah the rare exception to Betteridge’s law of headlines.

nickik 6y ago

I actually think the biggest engineering issue is gone be truck stops. Large truck stops that have 100+ trucks wanting to charge at the same time is gone be an issue. I don't have a good understanding of the grid, but I have heard that if more and more cars go from 400V to 800V+ that could cause issues in cities as well, but I don't understand it technically. How many cars will actually go to high voltage architecture is not clear yet.

paul7986 6y ago

They are ... the only one worth buying that makes sense is a Telsa in terms of being able to charge it on road trips. That can be tricky too if you want to make it to your 700 mile destination the quickest driving a car. If you have a Volt or a Leaf can you use a Telsa charger?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

olliej 6y ago

As a person who lives in California: is the nation’s grid ready for today’s usage? PG&E would indicate that the answer is no

socialdemocrat 6y ago

I am a bit surprised by why such articles are written without taking at least a glance at other countries which have been through this. Over 50% of annually sold cars in Norway are electric. About 10% of the cars on the roads are now electric in Norway. Most of the things the US is going to go through we have already been through. You can look at how we dealt with things such as charging at apartments. I live in an apartment in Norway so this was indeed an issue when I first inquired about getting an EV. Eventually however they started doing upgrades allowing us to connect multiple chargers in the garages. We have not experience problems with the grid but I am also of the impression that our grid is newer than what is common in the US. The biggest problem is the shared chargers. People get angry about inconsiderate drivers hogging a charging spot for too long. Also service for EVs is under heavy load.

csours 6y ago
Norway has extraordinary levels of renewable energy.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Yeah, but that is kind of irrelevant with respect to how the grid operates. Norway doesn't have 25% energy sitting there unused, ready for EVs. Quite the contrary, Norway uses pretty much all of its power. Norway's economy is built around it. We have a lot of really power hungry industry developed here over many years due to access to large amounts of cheap electric power. In fact there is a battle over building wind turbines in Norway now, because we need them to cover higher future electricity demand from EVs. And of course nobody wants them in their backyard.
jakewins 6y ago
Let me try to invert your point in the other direction. Imagine that, rather than having walkable cities, every Norwegian commuted alone by car for one hour every day. Imagine - and having lived in Scandinavia for many years, I know this is hard - that there is no grocery store within any reasonable biking or walking distance. Imagine an 8-hour drive is a normal weekend thing to do, because there is no working train infrastructure. In this version of Norway, every single Norwegian would own at least one car. Generally you own multiple cars, because if your one car goes to the shop, you cannot leave your house - it would take hours to walk or bike to work! This version of Norway, as you can imagine, has way, way way more cars. Specifically, roughly twice as many (~400 cars per 1000 Norwegians vs ~800 cars per 1000 Americans). And they drive, way, way way more miles per year. When you combine the much higher number of vehicles in America with the much higher number of annual miles driven, the American challenge, in kWh added to the grid, is perhaps 4-5 times the size of the Norwegian one. Not to mention that, in Norway there is a single grid maintained by a single operator working in lock-step with the national governments climate priorities. In America there are three grids managed by nine regional operators that all hate each other in various fascinating ways. All to say. There are definitely lessons, but Americas relationship to cars makes the "Norway can ramp car sales to 50% BEV why can't you" argument misplaced. It's like arguing that since the US grid adds, per quarter, twice as many BEVs as the Norwegian grid adds per year, why can't Norway take some pointers from the US? Well, because that's a silly comparison.

Proven 6y ago

Even better if the grid is NOT up to it - that's the whole point - look for additional ways more budget must be spent, as the US government, socialists and kleptocracy work together on destroying the republic and the US dollar.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

EV cars will get there and so too the infrastructure but it isn't there yet. Americans like big vehicles. This is solely lacking in the electric department. Americans also like convenience - no matter how many ways you try to slice and dice the argument it's less convenient right now. When EVs get bigger (more utility) and have longer charge and shorter charging time, they will take off. It just isn't there yet.

kgc 6y ago

Time for Tesla Powerwalls.

Gene_Parmesan 6y ago

This is maybe not the ideal place for this, but has the analysis been done to confirm that EVs are going to be a net positive for the environment? I have a lot of concerns stemming from the mining needed to secure the materials to make all these batteries. And the entire transportation sector is only responsible for 28% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the US, according to the latest data I could find. Would be happy to be have my concerns assuaged.