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Toyota's decision is based on their calculation that there wont be enough electricity produced to meet the demands of electric cars on a large scale, IIRC.

• pfdietz 3y ago
  And so they decided to go for hydrogen? If there isn't enough electricity, that means hydrogen derived from fossil fuels. So their hydrogen take was even more evil that it first appeared.
• stubish 3y ago
  This is pure spin. Toyota cannot make this claim for every region in the world where they sell cars. It is especially disingenuous when they have been pushing their hydrogen vehicles and there is not enough hydrogen production either, in any region, because it makes no sense to overproduce when there is no market.
• outside1234 3y ago
  Yes, because the grid is static and never can be expanded.
  • treeman79 3y ago
    It is more likely to be contracted.
    • idiotsecant 3y ago
      We're adding capacity to the grid literally every day, both at the transmission and distribution level. It's not going to 'contract'
    • Someone1234 3y ago
      There's reason to think otherwise: Natural Gas is being replaced and is due to see price increases. It will likely be replaced by electricity (namely Heat-Pump HVAC systems, and induction cook tops). In some states some developments aren't even hooked to the gas network, and the homes standards are such that electrification is the default. You have to measure electricity demand over years, not months, because seasonal changes and or weather can really corrupt your data.
    • nlewycky 3y ago
      The grid is going to explode. Let's start with California. Because they're a large economy, a large population centre and a famously leading on environmental issues, they tend to run into scaling and environmental problems first. Do you remember news about the California grid straining under the heat wave in 2022? The governor sent text messages to every Californian asking them to minimise their power usage? Power consumption across the state* reached 52GW. Every April, by the rules of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each state receives submissions of new projects that people want to build and connect to the grid. Each of these is called a "Cluster". In April 2021, cluster 14 included a proposed 110GW of new power generation. This was so many submissions that the state couldn't even finish their legally mandated analysis of all of the proposed projects in time for the new submissions for April 2022, so they pushed Cluster 15 back to 2023 (approved by FERC). It's past April 2023 and Cluster 15 projects proposed 354GW worth of power. If we take that CA can produce 50GW now, and add clusters 14 and 15, that's a little over 10× our current maximum power generation. You could argue that maybe some of these projects won't get built, that always happens in every cluster, but the number of withdrawn applications is a smaller percentage than usual. Estimates are that EVs will require us to double our current power generation. The glut in new power construction is not a California-specific phenomenon. https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-proposes-interconnection-reforms-address-queue-backlogs https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-proposes-intercon... * technically across the California Independent State Operator, https://caiso.com https://caiso.com , which is about 80% of California and also includes a tiny bit of Nevada for geographical reasons.
  • ryantgtg 3y ago
    And peak demand is 24 hours a day :p
• willio58 3y ago
  Keep in mind these “calculations” are based on biased data to help support the overall goals set forth by the leaders of the company.
  • thuuuomas 3y ago
    Which calculations? What data? What biases? What goals?
  • throwaway106382 3y ago
    and what "goal" would that be? to not sell cars and make money once the biggest markets all mandate them in under a decade?
    • KennyBlanken 3y ago
      To continue to sell cars which are unreliable and have huge supply chains. Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a much smaller supply chain, and require much less maintenance. Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more than a few years in order to artificially create a market for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle export to most of the world except for the US. I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that owning an old car in Japan is a significant status symbol. Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up with manufacturing compatible parts? The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US styling to make it even more difficult for third party parts. It also lets them keep cranking out models people think are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.
    • lucianbr 3y ago
      Large companies have difficulty making changes. The reason is exactly that: the goal is to make money, and doing what has made heaps of money for heaps of time already always seems like the best option. > The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the fact that though large innovators have some motivation to innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing so as new products will undermine their existing ones. I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.
• kwhitefoot 3y ago
  The British National Grid disagrees: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/electric-vehicles-myths-misconceptions https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele... "Does the electricity grid have enough capacity for charging EVs? The most demand for electricity in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency. Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we believe demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation. The US grid is equally capable of handling more EVs on the roads – by the time 80% of the US owns an EV, this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.1 A significant amount of electricity is used to refine oil for petrol and diesel. Fully Charged’s video Volts for Oil estimates that refining 1 gallon of petrol would use around 4.5kWh of electricity – so, as we start to use less petrol or diesel cars, some of that electricity capacity could become available."
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    Parts of the US grid are barely able to handle the load today. Rolling blackouts have been used in some areas. There may be enough total capacity to handle more use, but peak demand levels are already straining the system.
    • gary_0 3y ago
      It's weird how the US went from the "fuck it, let's visit the Moon" country to the "electricity stuff is too hard, wah" country. Snap out of it!
    • rgmerk 3y ago
      A) you can charge your EV at off-peak times. B) the US electricity grid is uniquely unreliable for a developed country.
    • somsak2 3y ago
      power outages that aren't weather related are not increasing. https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/surging-weather-related-power-outages https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/surging-weath...
• Server6 3y ago
  I've always argued this is a Field of Dreams problem. In that if you build it they will come. The electric will expand to meet demand.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Numbers that I saw recently: The largest US solar electrical generation plant right now is about 400MW. To electrify fast enough to get to about-as-close-to-net-zero-as-we-can-imagine by 2050, the US would need to build one of these plants and bring it online ... ... every two weeks.
    • blake1 3y ago
      The US installed 11.8GW solar last year. That is 453MW/every 2 weeks. :-) Yes, that’s nameplate capacity, so you can’t count on solar to delivery the power to get us over the line by itself. But we are nearly on track to the net zero goal when you add in … … wind.
• bink 3y ago
  Or they gambled that there would be enough hydrogen generation and distribution, which seems like an even worse bet. It's not that they decided to stick with ICE, it's that they chose an even worse fuel source.
  • _hypx 3y ago
    It's incredibly short-sighted to think like this. There will be a huge supply of hydrogen at some point in the future. This is due to it being the only truly sustainable energy storage technology. Nearly all others will have to be abandoned.
    • _aavaa_ 3y ago
      > in the future. Yes, and that's where it will stay in the future. Unfortunately, we need solutions that exist in the present.
  • alephnerd 3y ago
    A lot of this is because of the Japanese government itself. To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on China or the US due to lack of natural lithium deposits, which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery tech moot. To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would be the best bet due to 1. An early lead in hydrogen technology, so first mover advantage in technology exports and hydrogen infrastructure deals (already happening in India and Australia for example) 2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen fuels 3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from carbon resources) 4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up. These are a good overview - 1. Japan’s Hydrogen Industrial Strategy - https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-strategy https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str... 2. Japan Hydrogen Basic Strategy - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-basic-strategy https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-basic... 3. Basic Strategy for Hydrogen (the actual strategy paper. It's in Japanese) - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso_seisaku/pdf/20230606_2.pdf https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso...
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  Opel, Peugeot Sticking To Bicycles - Motorcars Will Never Have Enough Petrol Stations.
• ComputerGuru 3y ago
  I thought it was that it’s a more efficient use of lithium to make one hundred hybrids instead of ten EVs?
  • SyzygistSix 3y ago
    Then where are all their Prime vehicles that have had a huge waitlist for years? Toyota is just not delivering on the EV front at all. They could be cleaning up by stealing some of the Model Y customers back by selling a ton of RAV4s, especially the Prime versions.
  • Robotbeat 3y ago
    I always think it’s weird to believe in either of those things (that we can’t make enough electricity, which can be made in like a dozen different ways whether coal, oil, gas, biomass, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, etc, and that there won’t be enough lithium, even tho lithium isnt burned up, is extremely plentiful from conventional sources plus can be practically extracted from the ocean not to mention recycled indefinitely) and then be like “therefore, since we’ll have unlimited fossil fuels, let’s make more fossil fuel cars.”
    • ComputerGuru 3y ago
      I kind of get it. A) improving the eMPG (or is it MPGe?) of more cars on the road to reduce their fossil fuel consumption is better than giving a few cars zero-emission powertrains, courtesy of the 80-20 rule. (Hence the riddle about you having two cars you use equally and someone offering to magically take one from 40mpg to 1000mpg or the other from 10mpg to 40mpg - you are better off financially with taking the latter option.) B) The infrastructure for fossil fuel mining is here but scaling up lithium mining is going to add new horrors to the environment and the developing world.
      • megaman821 3y ago
        If you look at the amount of oil and gas that is extracted vs the amount of lithium that would we need to mine; it is like comparing the size of the Sun to Pluto. Mining lithium has downsides but there is just no way it could be as bad as oil and gas due to the orders of magnitude difference in quantities needed.
• rootusrootus 3y ago
  Given that it takes about the same amount of electricity to refine a gallon of gasoline as it does to power an EV over the same distance an ICEV would travel on that gallon, I think electrifying transportation isn't going to be a big deal. The grid will evolve for changing patterns of consumption, just as it always has. Even if we made 100% of all new car sales today EV the grid could keep up.
  • gnicholas 3y ago
    But the gallon of gas isn’t refined in my neighborhood, every night. It’s made in a centralized location, in advance, and if for some reason that location loses power, another location will make it and distribute to my local gas stations.
    • rootusrootus 3y ago
      Agreed, the grid will need to adapt to the changing consumption pattern, but the capacity is a solved problem. And we're building much more anyway. Personally, I've never found gas stations to be the beacon of reliability. They go down quickly in any kind of shortage situation. During the last ice storm here the local station ran out of gasoline in a couple days and diesel right after that. But I was able to buy propane without interruption, so that was good -- it doesn't rely on electricity to be dispensed. This is why my portable generators are now all dual fuel.
    • Tagbert 3y ago
      “ and distribute to my local gas stations.” If you are having a widespread, long term power outage, those gas pumps will not run due to not having electricity. Do you live in an area that has frequent power outages, then maybe this would be a concern, but in most areas an outage is pretty rare and are short term. If your area has unreliable power, perhaps they should be putting more power transmission lines underground?
      • gnicholas 3y ago
        Yes, PG&E cuts power proactively via their PSPS program. It doesn't affect most gas stations though, as they are more centrally located and not in neighborhoods. I believe they have looked into burying transmission lines, but found it to be economically infeasible.
• ip26 3y ago
  This makes no sense to me. Take Los Angeles. Almost everyone has AC. If you can power AC, you can charge an EV, and the loads peak at different times. (AC peaks around 3pm, EV can peak anywhere from 7PM to 5AM depending on programming) Blackouts can happen, but EV normally charge when power is cheapest and demand is lowest.