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Tesla Asking Owners to Limit Charging During Texas Heatwave
- JaimeThompson 4y agoI have been told by a few sources but I have no proof that Intel was going to build that huge fab complex in Texas but decided against it since the Texas/ERCOT grid was so unreliable. Has anyone else heard this?
- api 4y agoThey are building it in Ohio now. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-announces-next-us-site-landmark-investment-ohio.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...
- jcims 4y agoGargantuan win for Ohio. The plant itself is amazing but the support/supplier industry it brings will be tremendous. Honda has had two manufacturing plants in central Ohio for decades and 3-4 times as many people employed by the suppliers that popped up in the state than there are direct employees. Obviously the support/supply chain for Intel will be vastly different and won't be moving as much mass but it may make up for it in avg skillset and commensurate salary.
- throwtheacctawy 4y agoSmart move. Ohio has a well diversified economy and they really standout among rust belt states. I read semiconductor plants need a lot of freshwater. It is confusing why Arizona is receiving so much investment in fabs. The entire west is lacking in water. With the exception of the Seattle area; there isn't a city out West that doesn't have a major water concern. Meanwhile the Great Lakes have the largest bodies of freshwater in the world.
- JaimeThompson 4y agoI'm not on my main system right now but I remember some papers that said they require a lot of water to start but they recycle a lot of it.
- Hallucinaut 4y agoSecond largest, even collectively. Lake Baikal is REALLY deep.
- jmclnx 4y agoAnd yet people I know are moving to Texas to avoid Winter, while still working for the same company and org. Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool. Wonder how these places will fare in 10 years time, or will some people in the south pretend the rising heat is "fake news".
- manmal 4y ago> it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool Is it? Solar panels without any buffer battery should be a cheap energy source for an AC. There's also the possibility of using an air-to-air heat pump that warms in winter and cools in summer. Coupled with solar energy that should work quite well in Texas.
- JaimeThompson 4y agoI think you would want a small amount of battery just so the AC units wouldn't be damaged by rapid restart cycles but I am far from an expert on this.
- manmal 4y agoFair enough, I agree! Or a supercapacitor. Some EVs also allow bidirectional charging now, that‘s a pretty big buffer „for free“ as long as it’s in the garage at home.
- xyzzyz 4y ago> Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool. This really depends on what two places we are comparing. It’s definitely cheaper to heat your house in Bay Area than to cool it in Texas, but the story becomes different when you compare Texas with, say, Minnesota.
- stefan_ 4y agoHuh? Heating from 0 to 22 seems more energy intensive than cooling from 35 to that same number. Not to mention most heating is done through the equivalent of resistive heat, while ACs are overwhelmingly heat pumps.
- sschueller 4y agoHow long until it's no longer a question on the screen but enforced vis software? This is the downside of OTA and permanently connected devices. It doesn't belong to you and features you purchased can be taken away from you.
- apatil 4y agoYour broader point about OTA is certainly debatable, but off-peak charging can be incentivized (as opposed to mandated) very economically.
- salawat 4y agoIt's not debatable. It's plain as day.
- sschueller 4y agoYes, that would be the job of the power company and law makers.
- MBCook 4y agoYou could just go to an Electrify America station or EVgo station. Oh right, no CCS adapter in the US yet. So ChaDEmo at 50 kW at best.
- sschueller 4y agoWell you could pay $$ for the adapter...
- MBCook 4y agoI was under the impression Tesla didn’t sell the CCS adapter in the US yet. Did that change?
- sschueller 4y agoI wasn't aware that they would only sell those in Europe. Very odd.
- redleggedfrog 4y ago
- usrn 4y ago
- logicalmonster 4y ago> Texas doing its part to get the U.S. a little more 3rd world. Yes, a trolling statement For what it's worth, I believe that pretty much every region that sees even a little EV adoption experiences some electrical grid issues: whether it's the US or not. The big question is if things like electrical grid upgrades and intelligent charging will make these minor issues and minor growing pains, or a real problem. To give an overall opinion, I admire the heck out of the tech behind EVs, but I'm very skeptical about them providing an overall net benefit to the world for anybody but politicians who have a new excuse for a mismanaged society (I predict that at some point a new line of political attack will be something like this: "Forget about that electrical brownout Citizen, don't you understand we have to fight Climate Change? What are you a Climate Change Denier?") and entire new industries to sell influence and be corrupt for.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoNorway is at 80% EV adoption without grid issues. EVs use similar amounts of power and energy as AC.
- logicalmonster 4y ago1) Is that 80% statistic about total cars on the road, or about new car sales? That seems like a potential huge difference that's been misinterpreted. 2) Even in Norway, I've seen articles about EV growing pains. I don't know how up-to-date this is: but here's something for consideration (though the article seems optimistic about solving everything well). https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/12/norway-ready-100-evs-2025-please-dont-charge-thursday-nights/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/12/norway-ready-100-evs-20... 3) Projections about EVs aren't always accurate. I'm sure that economic collapse wasn't on the menu when many of these kinds of projections were done. The family that might have wanted to get into an EV soon in good times might be dealing with much bigger problems soon.
- tacoluv 4y agoI have always wondered if the increasing number of EVs would have the same effect on the electrical grid as YouTube/Netflix had on ISP infrastructure (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2013/11/11/netflix-and-youtube-accounts-for-over-50-of-peak-fixed-network-data-in-north-america/?sh=21d66e2527d6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2013/11/11/netflix...) I remember reading that Texas and California have the highest solar energy production potential in the states, and with the recent spikes in demand, I believe Texas will move closer to utilizing it. (https://web.archive.org/web/20120916045134/http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51946.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120916045134/http://www.nrel.g...)
- throwtheacctawy 4y agoTexas is ridiculously pro-energy. It doesn't matter what type of energy, either. Just look at west Texas oil fields - thousands of rigs pepper the landscape for tens of thousands of miles. NIMBY attitudes are not as popular in Texas.They really don't care what the world looks like. As a result, Texas has a massive amount of solar / wind production. They beat their own production goals, repeatedly. It would seem like a good idea to just sprinkle in solar and wind farms all throughout west Texas. Then setup high voltage lines to run the power to Albuquerque, El Paso, Waco, Odessa, Midland, etc. For perspective at the extent of oil production (and their lack of care over the landscape), look on Google Maps at Andrews, TX
- edent 4y agoIf modern cars and modernised networks implemented V2G (Vehicle To Grid) this would be a much easier issue to solve. Car owners would be incentivised to sell the electricity in their vehicles' batteries back into the grid. Similarly, the grid could disincentive charging - either through surge pricing or flat-out refusing to supply electricity to high-power circuits.
- option 4y agoIt’s not V2G but Kia EV6’s included vehicle to load feature makes me regret buying my Tesla (which does not support such feature)
- salawat 4y agoOf course, that surge procing would never be bidirectional, paying the end user when power is tapped into to go somewhere else, just to line the pockets of the utilities. Then there is the abuse potential. Because essentially you can now selectively increase electrical load on a particular vehicle with any type of on road charging or energy discharge infrastructure. But no... Authoritarians don't exist. No one would ever abuse wide-scale networked infrastructure to make their own lives easier!
- edent 4y agoThat's simply not true. I get paid a surge price to export my solar power. The UK sets a minimum floor for export pricing, but companies are free to charge more than that. Thanks to the power of the free-market, I switched to a provider who did time-of-day export pricing. I (or rather, my battery) can decide to sell the electricity back during peak hours. And, as for vehicles, they'll slurp up whatever is pumped to them. They control how much load they're willing to take. Could abuse happen? Sure. But it sounds like the situation in Texas is already pretty abusive.
- gruez 4y agoThis seems like the weirdest thing to worry about. If you're an authoritarian that wants to do bad things, you don't need V2G to do that. You can just hike the electricity rates.
- photochemsyn 4y agoWith more solar, EV batteries could be a useful means of power arbitrage, i.e. charge the vehicle using solar PV during the day, and hook it up to the grid during the night.
- ajross 4y agoThose ideas aren't actually coupled. It makes sense to charge cars (and any large battery devices with duty cycles longer than 24 hours) off-peak whether or not the power is provided by solar.
- throwtheacctawy 4y ago
- psyc 4y agoLOL "heat wave." Do they mean the "heat wave" that's going to last from now until October? AKA Texas summer?
- deepsun 4y agoI visited Austin, Texas last week. Amount of electricity wasting is enormous. Almost all stores, and all restaurants/bars have their doors wide open, blowing cold right out the door. Even some multilevel parkings do that (they don't even have enclosed walls). I'm not even talking about shitty walls insulation in a pretty good hotel, they wouldn't need much AC if walls weren't tangibly warm. Electricity problems in Texas are very overrated. Otherwise people and businesses wouldn't do that (i.e. there are no incentives for them to stop wasting huge amounts of energy).
- hotpotamus 4y agoI've lived in South Texas my entire life. I rarely see doors left open - automatic doors are the norm for larger shopping places, and I've never heard of let alone seen an air conditioned parking garage.
- cinntaile 4y ago> Electricity problems in Texas are very overrated. Otherwise people and businesses wouldn't do that (i.e. there are no incentives for them to stop wasting huge amounts of energy). This one is easy to solve, increase the electricity/fuel taxes.
- jimmaswell 4y agoIt's not a good solution for poor people to have to choose between heat stroke and a huge bill.
- DennisP 4y agoThis is solvable by giving everyone a fixed rebate.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoTypically this is done by utilities with price tiers (first 1000kwh costs X, next 1000kwh costs X * multiplier, etc). This trivially encourages conservation and discourages excessive consumption without complicated taxing and rebates. With that said, ERCOT has $20B worth of renewables projects in the interconnect pipeline, so the cost of energy should trend down over the next 3-5 years.
- megaman821 4y agoI know this article is supposed to be some weird dunk on Texas' power grid, but what is wrong with demand leveling? As more car become electric this is going to become common. If you have solar panels, charge your car during the excess power times. If you are using the grid, charge when demand is low. Texas has a lot (and has the potential for even more) wind and solar energy. Like the rest of the US grid, Texas needs to build more transmission lines to move the power from the middle of nowhere to the densely populated areas.
- ajross 4y agoThere's absolutely nothing wrong with demand leveling. Devices with large battery capacity are absolutely what you want to exploit to buffer short term shortfalls in capacity. It's comparatively trivial for car owners to limit charging to off-peak hours, so we should absolutely do that. That said: the reason this is a problem at all is Texas's criminal joke of a power infrastructure, and that deserves to be dunked on irrespective of mitigation strategies.
- megaman821 4y agoTexas' power infrastructure is exactly what is was incentivized to be. The same with the baby formula shortage. Up and down the economy we don't have the resilience to deal with demand or supply shocks. This short-sitedness needs to be discouraged and punished. I don't think Texas stands alone though, there are a lot of states and industries ill prepared to deal with any shocks to the system.
- bob1029 4y agoI've lived in Texas my whole life and have been working a full-time remote job the last ~half decade. Between the power grid issues and horrific summer heat, I am asking myself why I am still living here. I am also wondering why people with unlimited means are coming here. There isn't a whole lot to prevent me from leaving now... I am strongly considering moving to California or some region that approximates the weather patterns of SF. I keep asking myself if I want to live out the rest of my days in a place where the default mode of operation is "death or misery" unless you are inside some artificially-cooled arena.
- junofan 4y agoThe wildfires are no joke. PG&E isn’t great. Personally I’ve found my quality of life in Texas to be better.
- pengaru 4y ago> I keep asking myself if I want to live out the rest of my days in a place where the default mode of operation is "death or misery" unless you are inside some artificially-cooled arena. Unfortunately practically everywhere in the US where the default is year-round comfort and happiness, there's a lot of homelessness and visible crime on the streets. However I still prefer CA over most the alternatives, it's a huge state with plenty options outside of LA/SF/Oakland.
- winkeyless 4y agoThe areas with stable weather such as the OR and CA have been building too few homes to keep up with the population growth. Take the medium sized town I lived in for example, average home price is well over $1M which is unreachable for most. The city is bounded by sea and mountains and the land is mostly built out. Even though all new constructions are multi-family homes, hundreds more needs to be built. Existing homes are privately owned and will hardly change even under SB9 (allowing duplex). Empty or vacant lots are few and take years to review/infill. See the draft housing element: https://www.cityofsanmateo.org/DocumentCenter/View/87532 https://www.cityofsanmateo.org/DocumentCenter/View/87532 Found this an unfortunate recurring theme when people talk about moving for jobs/weather/lifestyle. The life-changing things are often local and outside your news feed
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoCan’t they just roll out a patch that intentionally slows down charging if the vehicle is in Texas?
- 1970-01-01 4y agonice -n10 supercharge mytesla
- krapp 4y agoTesla asks rich, entitled people in a state obsessed with personal liberty and performative indulgence to exercise a modicum of self control. I'm sure that will go over well.
- Handytinge 4y agoI would say that asking would go over significantly better than forcing. I'd also expect a good outcome from it. I think you meant "country", not "state" ;).
- rasz 4y agoLimit charging so Texas bitcoin farms dont have to https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/fort-worth-tx-the-first-city-in-the-us-to-mine-bitcoin.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/fort-worth-tx-the-first-city... https://fortune.com/2022/02/10/texas-world-capital-bitcoin-mining-companies/ https://fortune.com/2022/02/10/texas-world-capital-bitcoin-m... Reminds me of California use smaller shower nozzle so our farmers can grow almonds and alfalfa.