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> If our grid collapses because a few million people plug in a tiny 750W space heater overnight we've got some serious problems. Again, if you want to understa
by robomartin 5y ago
> If our grid collapses because a few million people plug in a tiny 750W space heater overnight we've got some serious problems.
Again, if you want to understand this well, I urge you to stop and create your own simulation model. This can be done in Excel.
The point is that it is very easy to make statements such as your when one does not make an attempt to actually model reality and see what this might mean. When you do (if you do) I assure you there will be an "Oh. That's what he was talking about." moment.
I very much understand that a full migration to EV's isn't likely to be possible for perhaps as long as fifty years, if not more. Yet, that's not the point here. What we are being asked to do to this nation and the world is motivated by the delusion of clean energy and pink unicorns. They are selling this delusion as if it were reality. It is not.
Let's assume that only a third of the 300 million vehicles convert to electric power in, say, 25 years. That means we need to increase our generation capacity by about 400 GW. For context, that means 400 nuclear power plants, each operating at 1 GW. I use nuclear power plants because this is a good measure of the scale of things as well as the impossibility of achieving such a goal in just 25 years. We can't build one in 25 years, much less 400 of them.
Even worse, the power distribution system, the "grid", would have to be rebuilt to at least double, if not triple, its power transport capacity. This due to a few realities, one of them being that you have to build it for present (once the upgraded version goes online) peak demand as well as future requirements.
To be clear, I am not proposing that going electric is a bad idea or that we should not do it. In a very much for the transition. What I am saying is that the delusion we are selling does not describe a path to a reality where even one third of vehicles can be electrified. In order to get there we have to abandon ideology and focus on math and science. Then we can plan a path that will get us there. Whatever "there" means, whether that is 25% electrics or 75%. We can't get there without a stop to all this ideological nonsense.
The perfect example of this is the insanity of our current oil production policies. Here in the US, the current government is doing all it can to kill our oil production and processing infrastructure. They hate it. Ideologically. They just hate it. Irrationally. Because they have all bought into the delusion.
What's reality? Well, if we want, say, 25% of our vehicles to go electric in 25 years, we have a massive job ahead of us. We have to build a massive amount of additional power generation capacity. We have to execute a decidedly non-trivial upgrade of our entire power delivery infrastructure. We have to build somewhere between 50K and 100K charging stations throughout the nation. We have to manufacture batteries, solar panels, cables and all the materials and components that go into such systems. We also have to build nuclear power plants faster than ever in history. And more. I can't possibly list all the dependencies in the tree that leads to being ready for 25% of our vehicles becoming electrics. Not to mention actually manufacturing the vehicles.
What do we need in order to accomplish the above? Cheap oil. What I mean by "cheap" is $20 oil, rather than $130 per barrel. Why? Because EVERYTHING we will have to make, move, install, manufacture requires oil. Everything. You can't build a power plant without a massive amount of fuel. The cables that move the electricity? You can't make them without oil. You can't install them without oil. Manufacturing parts, and structural materials (beams, etc.) out of steel and aluminum? You can't do it without oil. Plastics, electronic components, microprocessors, displays, computers, motors, car bodies, etc. Everything is based on industrial processes that depend on oil. Humanity cannot exist in its current form without oil.
And so, the paradox here is that, if we want a future where ground transportation is significantly less dependent on petroleum, we have to make petroleum as cheap as possible for somewhere around twenty five years, if not more. Only after making that kind of a monumental effort will we be able to start detaching from oil. We can't get there from here because, at $100+ per barrel these projects become insanely expensive and likely unattainable.
We need a real plan of action based on real math and science. And then we do everything we must do to make it happen. We have to leave this delusion behind us in order to move forward. If we don't, electric vehicles will be doomed to being an oddity for decades upon decades.
- vel0city 5y ago> Let's assume that only a third of the 300 million vehicles convert to electric power in, say, 25 years. That means we need to increase our generation capacity by about 400 GW. Can you point me to the actual math and not just a YouTube video of a guy habitually wrong about technology and talk of a spreadsheet model of probably inaccurate usages which really claims such needs? Because in practice I've got an EV in my garage tonight which doesn't increase our overall power demands at all. In fact, it's only finally using the negative generation costs that we've had in my area for years. That's right, right now as my EV charges the wholesale cost of energy in my area is negative USD. There's not enough load to meet the generation demand! My retail provider is making money buying power at negative cost on me charging my car at the moment. Adding more cars charging right now would only bring balance to that mismatch of generation to demand, not overload demand at all. The model you've mentioned above has a lot of questionable assumptions baked into it. It didn't take a new transformer for my home to support an EV, nor my neighbor, nor the person next door to them. So when thinking of vehicles, and especially not miles or per pound of payload delivered, it's really not that crazy. Please feel free to share your magical spreadsheet model which explains everything. I'd love to see it. It sounds like it makes a lot of assumptions which may or may not be realistic. But until you share that I'm going by my actual use cases I've actually seen in person with EVs, where it didn't increase my peak power at all, and between myself and my neighbors was absorbed by the grids capacity without any issue at all. So let's take your example of building out a model based on usage I've actually experienced. How much peak load has my EV actually added to my home's usage? 0 additional kW peak? Cool, so we extrapolate that to all the other single family houses, so we can easily add over 15 million EVs to our fleet before we even need to upgrade a single line. Given we've only managed to produce a few hundred thousand EVs in several years it'll probably take many decades before we even each that 15 million figure, so we're probably fine to slowly roll out upgrades to our grid if we're really only targeting upgrading commuter vehicles at the moment.
- robomartin 5y ago> Please feel free to share your magical spreadsheet model which explains everything. And that is precisely how to put a violent end to an otherwise cordial conversation.