When it reaches 100 million electric cars, Peaks are going to be really big on the power grids.
The electrical grid needs improvement, a few battery hubs won't do.
The energy to move 1 billion cars around needs to come from somewhere and it needs transportation for that energy from source to user. This requires big changes in power infrastructure. Wonder what the future holds.
What are your thoughts on home batteries? Assuming the decline of battery prices is a major influence in the uptake of electric vehicles, I'm wondering if a similar uptake in home batteries (alongside residential solar) would mitigate stress on the grid.
Home batteries would have to hold more than the car.
This will still put the baseline of the grid higher, just averages it out possibly taking more when its a good time.
I think batteries should be hosted/hooked up by the power company, so they can attach them to a power management system. (I think that already exists)
I left out the "where will we get all this power" part, because that is already discussed a lot. I just wonder if the power grid will be able to handle this immense increase in usage, even if spread out. You still need to transport it.
edit: I think the powering down of offices and business makes enough room for the evening to use more.
You can drive your car empty faster than your home battery might charge (due to supply/demand), and it is possible to give back to grid if there is a peak in your area.
With smarter grids that support dynamic realtime pricing of electricy to end users, I think electric cars, home batteries and even appliances like fridges, refrigerators and washing machines can help balance supply and demand in the grids, using electricity, pausing consumption or pumping it back into the grid as needed.
The UK government recently performed an industry consultation on this subject and has released a plan to:
* remove barriers to smart technologies (such as storage and demand-side response)
* enable smart homes and businesses
* improve access to energy markets for new technologies and business models
It's not necessarily going to lead to much higher peaks. Most EVs do not need to charge continuously from the moment the owner gets home until the owner leaves home the next morning. Simply time-shifting the bulk of charging to, say, between 9 pm and 6 AM would enable vehicle charging without boosting peaks on the California grid:
It's even better for places where renewable generation is more weighted toward wind than solar, like Texas, because wind output tends to peak while people are sleeping and demand is otherwise low:
peaks will happen if enough people do it at the same time. Almost every summer (maybe except this one), there's always that heat wave that taxes the grid. A solvable problem for sure (just like how we can now handle cell phone overload during emergencies) but lets not pretend the problem doesn't exist.
It may require that electric providers require deferred charging, even to the point they set when you can. While you could defer your charging don't expect that everyone will. As we see with charging stations in areas with more EVs there are those who just don't care. We need to instruct future owners the expected etiquette
In the UK, differential tariffs were introduced in the 1970s for the benefit of homeowners with electric storage heating. On the Economy 7 tariff you get substantially discounted power for a seven hour period overnight, often as much as 50% lower than the peak rate. Pretty much every British EV owner uses this tariff and a timed charger, because it offers huge cost savings.
What if something unusual happens? Imagine there is a long blackout during those 9pm to 6am hours. It doesn't have to be the entire city, just a significant number of homes. The next morning, thousands of drivers find they don't have enough power to get to work. Thousands of cars are suddenly charging beyond the expected 9pm to 6am window. Will the grid be able to handle full daytime load in addition to this huge unexpected load? How much would it cost to upgrade the grid to worst case scenario? (entire city blackout during 9pm to 6am)?
If charging shifts to early-mid morning after an overnight outage, I would expect that there's enough distribution/generation capacity to handle it. Take a look at this curve again:
Although demand at 7:00 AM is 5 gigawatts above the 4:00 AM nadir, it's still 15 gigawatts below the 5:00 PM peak. Since electrical generating and distribution systems are sized to handle those early-evening peaks, shifting charging some hours away from the traditional peaks (either direction, later or earlier) should allow vehicles to recharge daily without increasing daily peak demand.
What about places that aren't California? Even places that have more seasonal electricity demand in the winter than in the summer, like the UK, see their daily peaks in the early evening. Peak demand hours are more about human behavior than geography. People come home after work, cook dinner, turn on lights, do chores... Traditional peak demand hours coincide with this burst of domestic activity. Scheduling charging away from the traditional peak electricity times makes more efficient use of existing infrastructure and allows peak distribution/generation capacity upgrades to be delayed and minimized even with rising adoption of home-charged EVs.
The average American drives about 55 miles per day. A typical EV uses about 300Wh per mile. That gives us a typical demand of about 17kWh of charging per day. A standard single-phase fast charger puts out 7kW and a three-phase fast charger puts out 22kW. There's plenty of opportunity to spread out that demand throughout the overnight off-peak period, because most EV users only need to charge for a couple of hours per day.
With smart metering, EVs can also feed energy back to the grid during transient demand peaks. Users won't notice if 5% of their battery is ringfenced for grid storage, but it'll provide a vast proportion of the storage capacity we need to manage an all-renewable grid.
Between the rebalancing of peak and off-peak demand and the potential to use EVs for grid storage, the widespread adoption of EVs is likely to be of net benefit to the electricity grid.
> Peaks are going to be really big on the power grids
Can you supply some supporting documentation for this? All the studies I've seen have shown that the charge cycle is very flat, can be centrally demand controlled, and essentially "fills in" the night-time slump that saps much of the generating profit from major types (e.g., thermal) of generator plants.
If every household hooks up, and all the trucks?
Currently there is more investment in solar/wind, one is always unreliable and the other is certainly off at night. Now a grid of batteries might be enough to fill up the gaps today, but once that night slum is no longer a slum, who knows how big batteries you'll need.
We're still at low levels of renewable penetration on our grid; once over 50%, all these vehicles become a fantastic source of "negative" demand response. Current demand response asks customers to decrease consumption when there's peak usage and the grid is strained. Negative demand response is a signal to consume electricity when a free-on-the-margin source like solar would otherwise be curtailed.
The massive array of car batteries becomes an absolutely wonderful source of both positive and negative demand response. Currently, almost no one insists on driving around with a 100% full fuel tank. Those with electric cars commonly keep them around 80%. And daily usage of the battery is nearly always far less than 50%. And a decent sized EV battery is 1-2 days of household electricity usage.
If a significant chunk (20%-30%?) of our electrical demand is for battery-powered transport, we've solved a huge problem that comes with high wind and solar penetrance on the grid, without having stationary batteries. As car batteries age and have reduced capacity, they will potentially have a second life as stationary storage, where power density doesn't matter as much.
This means, that if we are able to install chargers at a percentage of workplaces, that car batteries will be able massively smooth out not only the daily duck curve of demand, but also deal with fluctuations where some days have more production and others less.
I think the expectation is that as the grid slowly gets "smart" this will reduce the peaky-ness of demand generated by electric car charging. If the price of a kWh is dynamic based on current use then the combination of smart charging stations & locally installed batteries should even things out a lot.
Obviously the total consumption will increase dramatically. If this shift takes place the society-wide energy mix will include a lot less petrol/gasoline/diesel and lot more electricity.
Hopefully the prices of solar & wind will continue to fall and the shift in this mix will be massively to the advantage of the environment - and to the quality of life in our cities.
So a battery will need to recharge 1kWh for each 5km traveled. The typical US commuter travels 48km per day. 50km per day / 5km/kWh is 10kWh per day of required draw.
Say 10 hours of charging per day smooths this out to an additional draw of 1kW per driver (a big assumption).
With 100M additional electric cars (there are only 165M daily commuters) in the US, the additional draw on the power grid would require 1,000GW of additional capacity.
That's a 25% increase over 2016 power generation. Compared to the 1999-2016 growth rate of 9.5%, it is significant, but seems manageable. Especially considering it'll take 10+ years for electric cars to be widely used by a significant fraction of the US workforce.
This type of demand is far different from that 9.5% growth rate, and far more manageable, precisely because it happens during off-peak hours. At night, transmission lines are uncongested, and the wind (typically) blows more.
10kWh × 165M on the night grid, that's big impact.
I went and got the miles travelled per year and the total nr of vehicles, you are not far off. although we are forgetting that most traffic is during weekdays, and the size of the cars varies (and with it the usage) For convenience I don't do anything with the size of the cars.
"According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2012, there were 254,639,386 registered vehicles. Of these, 183,171,882 were classified as "Light duty vehicle, short wheel base", while another 50,588,676 were listed as "Light duty vehicle, long wheel base". Another 8,190,286 were classified as vehicles with two axles and six or more tires and 2,469,094 were classified as "Truck, combination". There were 8,454,939 motorcycles also listed along with 764,509 buses."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...
250m vehicles in us, if 150m of those are electrical at some point, and the number of miles driven total might be 3.5T miles by then (3.5×0.6=2.1T) 2.1/150m/313×1.6 (6 days of driving a week, and miles to km) comes to 71 km per day, which is 14 kWh (6/7 days) of required draw.
I think it is manageable like you said, considering that it will take a while.
If most people used electric bicycles instead it would be about 1kWh per day instead +-100%, on tenth of the energy consumption, that would lead to more productive work hours, and less time spent at hospitals, and less issues with the big killer diseases affecting heart and lungs.
that would be great, but many areas in the united states are not very friendly to bicycle (even electric bicycle) commuting. better urban design has important implications for all kinds of things about how we live our lives, sustainability especially.
Looks like you're off by an order of magnitude; that should be:
1kw (continuous) * 100M drivers = 100GW (continuous)
for the typical commuting patterns. That's a lot of power of course, I agree it would increase cumulative consumer demand for electricity by about 25%.
But the key is that this is nearly perfectly dispatchable demand. It won't cause anything like the same disruption to the grid as non-dispatchable, or even weakly dispatchable demand like air conditioning (which can flex how much is consumed briefly, but will annoy users if it varies across too long a time span).
> Especially considering it'll take 10+ years for electric cars to be widely used by a significant fraction of the US workforce.
This is key, plus I think we're overstating how fast this will happen.
In 2016 we're still at sub 1% of all new car sales being electric, at 0.9%. i.e. for every 100 cars we're adding to our roads, not even one full electric car is added. Not to mention about half of the electric cars are hybrids.
Average age of cars is about 12 years. So if the 1:99 ratio is overturned say in a decade to favour electric cars (which seems ambitious itself[0]), it'll take at least another decade to phase out existing cars and see the fleet get replaced by new, mostly electric.
So 10+ I think is conservative, it's probably 20+.
Another thing to mention is that we can generate a lot more electricity with our existing capacity than we do. Why don't we? Because at night the demand simply isn't there. But with a software-based transport & fueling system that EV offer, a lot of this extra demand can be shifted during times of low-demand, without needing to install extra capacity, but rather just not taking as much capacity offline nightly.
Finally, I cautiously expect a shift away from personal transport and public transport, but towards semi-public/personal. i.e., I'd be quite feasible if you could hail a self-driving pod in 20 years, get in, have your destination set via whatever has replaced our smartphone (e.g. software assistent), and get out, paying automatically, a la uber today. The pod drives according to your personal wishes, but it's part of a shared public transport system. I expect this to make driving safer and more fuel efficient in driving behaviour, more efficient in terms of capacity (no more 4-seater cars full of 1 person, no more driving around with vacation-level storage that's mostly empty on 9/10 trips), more efficient in terms of size (lighter vehicles, less crumple zone required). This shift too may significantly increase the km per kwh spent in the next few decades.
[0] As for whether electric becoming the majority of car sales within 10 or 20 years is feasible... a little context: it must be noted that the US sold 96k electric vehicles in 2013. In 2016 it's 157k. Growth rates are a little under 18% yoy. If you'd grow at 32% a year, which is twice the annual growth rate compared to the past few years, you'd sell 2.5 million electric vehicles in 2026, annually. But the US sells more than 17 million non-electrics annually today, so you're still not making a huge dent. That's a shitty calculation of course, but it's some context. Typical forecasts predict something like 30% of new car sales to be electric in 2030. Again, that's new sales. About 8% of cars are retired each year, if you replace them by 30% electric cars, it takes about a decade after 2030 to even get to 30% of the actual car fleet to be electric.
So all in all, I don't really think the grid is the biggest challenge here, although there are obviously very large investments to be made.
I hope it holds a great shift towards decentralization of energy production. Not complete decentralization, but a blend of massive power plants like today, and lots and lots of homes with solar panels on roof tops and the like.
I also hope fusion research is accelerated. Fusion in the sky, plus fusion down on Earth, that would cover a lot of bases. Portable fusion reactors would also truly open up the solar system - ride the fusion torch to your destination, power your habitat with fusion reactors.
Counterpoint: EVs plugged in at work charge during the day. Scaling up charging infrastructure at work probably pays for its own deployment in reduced energy storage costs. If the underlying economics are there, it's "just" about getting the incentives right.
An always-connected EV fleet can dispatch charging from a central load-leveling server, passing a percentage of the utility revenue along to incentivize the EV owner. Such a car would always Do The Right Thing(TM) with respect to TOU/tiered metering, real-time (or forecast) renewable generation, local distribution grid loading, and the availability of any extra baseload generation at night.
Personally I would want the option to always immediately charge the car to X miles of range (to drive to the local hospital), and to always charge to Y miles by Z:00 every day (for commuting). Subject to those constraints, the service provider is free to shift around the charging schedule to suit conditions on the local electric grid. The more leeway the service provider has to shift charging around, the more the EV owner earns.
Obviously Tesla is pursuing this, but I hope they have competition.
Good idea, but the infrastructure would have to be tied to the building, not to the companies operating in it. A lot of companies change offices all the time, and then there are all those small companies that can't afford to build this sort of thing.
So it would have to be part of regular infrastructure just like running water or comm/data lines.
It will be interesting to see the impact on oil producing nations, if the price of oil plummets most of them are going to be in real trouble as few of them have diverse economies.
We already are seeing what happens to the likes of surprised countries like Columbia and Zimbabwe and worried countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It's a big deal and diversification is not an option, it's the way they need to go.
It has already been happening to Russia the last few decades - as the price of oil rose then fell it played havoc with their economy and government budgets
If this shift takes place - what would be the best 10 year investment strategy be? Long electric utilities, renewable generation, charging networks, smart grid companies & lithium miners. Short oil companies, petrodollar denominated govt. bonds & gas station networks.
Is there a "massive shift to electric cars within 10 years" ETF I can buy?
Still buy gas, it's not like we're going to suddenly produce clean energy. All that's going to happen is we are going to build more power plants to support charging cars...
With the push for less nuclear, and less coal, all that's left is oil and natural gas. Renewable energy is no where near where it's necessary. So invest in companies that build windmills, solar, etc. But also natural gaz power plants.
Really the best investments are construction companies, and companies that manage and build the power grid infrastructure.
Anyways, electric cars are made for renewables (sans hydro) and nuclear that provide energy when it might not be needed but can be used for charging batteries instead. Gas will fill in the gaps, but it's on demand nature means it doesn't really become more useful like the other sources do with car electrification.
Only time will tell, but right now I would bet on wind, solar, storage, imports, exports, etc. Eventually those existing reactors are going to age and need to be decommissioned, the median age is now more than 30 years old. Every year, construction of the EPR design is proving to be more and more expensive than they thought.
Of course, if somebody in the Western world can figure out how to build a nuclear reactor on time with a competitive budget, nuclear may enter that mix of new construction. But right now, with the past decades' trends, it is not looking good for nuclear.
So is this something you are saying about France or something France has said itself. Last time I checked, France was still pretty dedicated to nuclear, unlike Germany....which gets a lot of exported nuclear power from France.
I believe they are very dedicated to nuclear as well. However, the entire point of my comment was that they are having a difficult time constructing nuclear reactors, just like everybody else in the Western world. Without new construction, their existing nuclear fleet (median age >30 years) will eventually need to be decommissioned just due to time.
> build more power plants to support charging cars...
The bigger and engine is, the more efficient it typically is. Electric cars are already more clean even when you factor in the filthiest of power plants.
Companies well position for high voltage DC. Possible solar technologies. Traditional car manufacturers who look poised to survive the electric/autonomous transition, which will likely reduce demand and cause some bankruptcies and consolidation in the auto industry. I am particularly partial toward Japanese car companies and Tesla for being survivors. Old giants like General Electric still build a lot of our grid infrastructure.
Petro companies will still do well though; we still need plastics, jet fuel, industrial chemicals, and even still gasoline, as it will be a byproduct of these other products. Lower demand for diesel and gasoline in cars could benefit transoceanic shipping and airline companies.
The "problem" with looking for good investments is that electric vehicles are fundamentally about conserving energy and materials, so after the electric car revolution there is going to be less economic activity than before.
You have to add the weight of petrol to that (let's say 80 liters or 60kg). That's partly compensated by the weight of the electrical engine (70 pounds = 30kg) that you have to add to the Tesla.
=> all else being equal, the Tesla will be heavier.
However, 'All else being equal' currently is a bit debatable, I think. Tesla seems to have optimized further for weight than conventional manufacturers do.
I'm still concerned about the time needed for recharging, especially if that recharging is to be a home with the now common 100 A and 230 V connection to the grid.
Even with charging stations, there
is the question about how fast can
recharge a battery without overheating it.
> I'm still concerned about the time needed for recharging, especially if that recharging is to be a home
Charging at home is the least worrisome of all charging situations, because you can charge while you sleep and not care about how long it takes. Same with charging at shopping centres, restaurants, parks, hotels, etc., because you're going to spend the time doing the thing you went there to do anyway, regardless of whether you're charging or not.
The only time charging speed actually matters is when you're on a long road trip and need to keep moving. That's when you need a fast charging solution, like CHAdeMO or Tesla's Superchargers.
In the US, houses commonly have from the
grid 100 A at 230 V. So, that is
100 x 230 = 23,000 W (Watts)
or 23 KW (kilowatts).
For an electric car with a 75 KWh battery,
the charging time using all the house
power would be
75 / 23 = 3.26
hours. Maybe the house needs also to use
an electric stove, electric clothes dryer,
air conditioning, a water pump, a
microwave oven, some lights, etc. so
wants to use only half the house power for
the car charging in which case the
charging time would be
"With unparalleled performance delivered
through Tesla's unique, all-electric ....
will achieve the maximum charge rate of
11.5 kW for 75 kWh configured vehicles."
Then the minimum charging time would be
75 / 11.5 = 6.52
hours.
So, net, for an electric car, I'd be
concerned about charging time.
With a gasoline powered car, can fill up
in a few minutes.
A lot of countries are getting pretty aggressive about electric vehicles. The grids will probably scale but the geopolitical ramifications are more unpredictable.
The demand for the US dollar worldwide is linked to oil and the 70s deal with the Saudis. This is a core component of US foreign policy that people like Gaddafi and Saddam found the hard way. US foreign policy is deeply linked to oil.
The middle east itself is a hotbed of political intrigue and geopolitical action since oil, and will lose this central role in the global sphere. Both of these will have far reaching consequences for global politics.
I don't see an extremely widespread adoption of electric vehicles until the battery issue is fixed.
Half of the issue is almost solved: Range. But it has a couple of problems.
First, while the range of miles being able to be driven on a battery is now fairly large - upwards of 200+ miles - that still isn't quite comparable to the range an internal combustion engine can get. That value needs to double, if the car is to be used for more than general commuting (at least here in the United States, where the only way to go between cities cheaply and without hassle is to drive).
Some of this issue may be mitigated in the future - and other advances could help it with current technology for batteries; for instance, more power efficient motors would greatly assist in extending the range of current battery technology capabilities.
The second issue is Charging. For general commuting, this likely isn't an issue at all, even today. Just find a place to charge it, plug in, go into the office (or wherever). At home, plug it in, and it will be ready to leave again in the morning. But for long distance driving, assuming you have a place to recharge (let's suppose this is common in the future), you still have to wait a while to get a decent charge on the battery.
With an ICE, you can simply pull up, put some fuel in, and be gone in less than 5 minutes, depending on what you need. You can't do that currently with an electric vehicle. Instead, you need to wait around until it is recharged; if you have no reason to wait (like stopping for food or something), you are basically forced. For long distance driving, this has good and bad points, but sometimes you just want to fill the car up, get some snacks, and go.
Maybe the segment of the market that does longer drives is shrinking, or is already small enough not to matter? Maybe advances will help out here? Maybe car owners can add a "hybrid module" for long distance drives that incorporate an ICE/generator combo to keep the battery topped up as it is driven? Right now, the answers are unclear.
For those who are only going to and from work, maybe doing a bit of shopping, electric cars can make sense. For others, at best they'll be a secondary vehicle, or only used for going to work and back, with something else in the driveway for longer distances.
Lastly - there's the issue with the supply of lithium on the planet. I have read (I don't know the truth of this) that there isn't enough lithium available to support a large population all using electric vehicles. Perhaps we'll find other sources, or perhaps my information is out of date. Recycling will help too, most likely. Future battery technology may do away with the need for lithium. Lots of "ifs" here, but we may have an issue if we are sticking to lithium chemistry for power (given the reactivity of lithium vs other elements, this may not be possible - IIRC, elements that are more reactive than lithium have problems to them for the use of them in batteries).
> For those who are only going to and from work, maybe doing a bit of shopping, electric cars can make sense. For others, at best they'll be a secondary vehicle, or only used for going to work and back, with something else in the driveway for longer distances.
I'm trying to think of how often in the last year I've needed more than 200 miles round trip in a single day where I didn't spend a significant % of the time that day in a metro.
Zero times.
Last 5 years, maybe once.
I live in Seattle, a rather remote city when it comes to Getting To Things To Do, but a 200 mile range brings me safely into another country with over 50 miles to spare. With less than 200 miles I can get to the next major metropolitan city (Portland), in the other direction. ~80 east or west get me to two of the most popular camping spots in the state.
Heading to Spokane is a problem however. For that I'd need almost 280 miles.
For reference, my compact 1.6L ICE gets ~250 miles out of a tank of gas. (Fill up is a lot faster though!)
For road tripping width-wise across the US, ICE is superior. But for the majority of commutes (30 miles round trip), an electric car can be plugged in a couple times per week and leave plenty left over for other activities.
As batteries get better and cars charge less frequently, solar improves (and improved solar is added to the car's energy collection) and wind too - the demand will even out, in fact the demand per car may well decrease by a large margin - as market forces come into play (think the MPG figure for marketers).
Local generation can take up the slack too, with fewer volts being sent over wasteful energy grids - that can waste 6-7% of energy in transit, up to 30% in undeveloped countries.
I was concerned before I got my first electric car that the electricity bills would be massive. But I use the car every day, charge it at home 70% of the time and I have hardly noticed an increase in my bills.
I think the fear that the grid won't be able to cope is overblown. Especially in hotter countries where solar will have such a massive impact on transport.
In fact reducing oil consumption will only have benefits in remote locations where oil is very difficult to come by. Think about places where oil is a reason for war. No one will fight over the sunshine.
I was concerned before I got my first electric car that the electricity bills would be massive.
That should have been an easy calculation to at least get a ballpark figure of what to expect.
But I use the car every day, charge it at home 70% of the time and I have hardly noticed an increase in my bills.
Any decent charger should be able to tell you, once you tell it how much you pay for electricity, how much you spend each month to charge. For us, it's about $20/month compared to $60 or $70 for ICE. And that car never needs to spend time at a gas station, which once we owned an electric, is more of a hassle than I thought.
I used to drive a Volt to work, where I had access to charging and Booster for the rarely needed gas fill-up. On days when my wife's Prius was low on gas, we'd switch cars and I'd fill it up while at work. We didn't visit a gas station for months with either car.
Unfortunately, we got rid of the Volt and I now ride my bike, so no charging and no Booster. The Prius tank now has to get below 0 on the gauge before either of us will find the time to go out of our way to a gas station.
Thats odd, considering that calculations say that on average one would use 4000 kwh per year. (with average 10.000 kwh per house) Do you drive very little, or you charge mostly at work?
Personally I use 3500 kwh per year in my house. I would notice the bill going up. But I would also notice a bill disappearing all together.
I do 10k miles a year, the range on my car is about 90 miles effective in the summer and 70 in the winter. I charge fully every 2-3 days and top up on long journeys over 60/70 miles using the motorway chargepoints.
My bills have not really shifted - there may be an increase as the battery becomes less effective, and as winter sets in - but I'm due a new car in 8 months - as the pcp deal I have runs out then.
66 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 94.2 ms ] threadThis will still put the baseline of the grid higher, just averages it out possibly taking more when its a good time. I think batteries should be hosted/hooked up by the power company, so they can attach them to a power management system. (I think that already exists)
I left out the "where will we get all this power" part, because that is already discussed a lot. I just wonder if the power grid will be able to handle this immense increase in usage, even if spread out. You still need to transport it.
edit: I think the powering down of offices and business makes enough room for the evening to use more.
The UK government recently performed an industry consultation on this subject and has released a plan to:
* remove barriers to smart technologies (such as storage and demand-side response)
* enable smart homes and businesses
* improve access to energy markets for new technologies and business models
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/upgrading-our-ene...
http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx#SupplyandDeman...
It's even better for places where renewable generation is more weighted toward wind than solar, like Texas, because wind output tends to peak while people are sleeping and demand is otherwise low:
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.htm...
jasonmaydie showed that even if a problem is solved it can still be a "problem"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7
http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx#SupplyandDeman...
Although demand at 7:00 AM is 5 gigawatts above the 4:00 AM nadir, it's still 15 gigawatts below the 5:00 PM peak. Since electrical generating and distribution systems are sized to handle those early-evening peaks, shifting charging some hours away from the traditional peaks (either direction, later or earlier) should allow vehicles to recharge daily without increasing daily peak demand.
What about places that aren't California? Even places that have more seasonal electricity demand in the winter than in the summer, like the UK, see their daily peaks in the early evening. Peak demand hours are more about human behavior than geography. People come home after work, cook dinner, turn on lights, do chores... Traditional peak demand hours coincide with this burst of domestic activity. Scheduling charging away from the traditional peak electricity times makes more efficient use of existing infrastructure and allows peak distribution/generation capacity upgrades to be delayed and minimized even with rising adoption of home-charged EVs.
With smart metering, EVs can also feed energy back to the grid during transient demand peaks. Users won't notice if 5% of their battery is ringfenced for grid storage, but it'll provide a vast proportion of the storage capacity we need to manage an all-renewable grid.
Between the rebalancing of peak and off-peak demand and the potential to use EVs for grid storage, the widespread adoption of EVs is likely to be of net benefit to the electricity grid.
Can you supply some supporting documentation for this? All the studies I've seen have shown that the charge cycle is very flat, can be centrally demand controlled, and essentially "fills in" the night-time slump that saps much of the generating profit from major types (e.g., thermal) of generator plants.
The massive array of car batteries becomes an absolutely wonderful source of both positive and negative demand response. Currently, almost no one insists on driving around with a 100% full fuel tank. Those with electric cars commonly keep them around 80%. And daily usage of the battery is nearly always far less than 50%. And a decent sized EV battery is 1-2 days of household electricity usage.
If a significant chunk (20%-30%?) of our electrical demand is for battery-powered transport, we've solved a huge problem that comes with high wind and solar penetrance on the grid, without having stationary batteries. As car batteries age and have reduced capacity, they will potentially have a second life as stationary storage, where power density doesn't matter as much.
This means, that if we are able to install chargers at a percentage of workplaces, that car batteries will be able massively smooth out not only the daily duck curve of demand, but also deal with fluctuations where some days have more production and others less.
Obviously the total consumption will increase dramatically. If this shift takes place the society-wide energy mix will include a lot less petrol/gasoline/diesel and lot more electricity.
Hopefully the prices of solar & wind will continue to fall and the shift in this mix will be massively to the advantage of the environment - and to the quality of life in our cities.
This got me thinking, what does the power draw look like?
A Model S has two battery options
- 60kWh / 335km @ 5.85km/kWh - 85kWh / 426km @ 5.01km/kWh
So a battery will need to recharge 1kWh for each 5km traveled. The typical US commuter travels 48km per day. 50km per day / 5km/kWh is 10kWh per day of required draw.
Say 10 hours of charging per day smooths this out to an additional draw of 1kW per driver (a big assumption).
With 100M additional electric cars (there are only 165M daily commuters) in the US, the additional draw on the power grid would require 1,000GW of additional capacity.
That's a 25% increase over 2016 power generation. Compared to the 1999-2016 growth rate of 9.5%, it is significant, but seems manageable. Especially considering it'll take 10+ years for electric cars to be widely used by a significant fraction of the US workforce.
10kWh × 165M on the night grid, that's big impact.
I went and got the miles travelled per year and the total nr of vehicles, you are not far off. although we are forgetting that most traffic is during weekdays, and the size of the cars varies (and with it the usage) For convenience I don't do anything with the size of the cars.
"According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2012, there were 254,639,386 registered vehicles. Of these, 183,171,882 were classified as "Light duty vehicle, short wheel base", while another 50,588,676 were listed as "Light duty vehicle, long wheel base". Another 8,190,286 were classified as vehicles with two axles and six or more tires and 2,469,094 were classified as "Truck, combination". There were 8,454,939 motorcycles also listed along with 764,509 buses." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...
250m vehicles in us, if 150m of those are electrical at some point, and the number of miles driven total might be 3.5T miles by then (3.5×0.6=2.1T) 2.1/150m/313×1.6 (6 days of driving a week, and miles to km) comes to 71 km per day, which is 14 kWh (6/7 days) of required draw. I think it is manageable like you said, considering that it will take a while.
> an additional draw of 1kW per driver
> 100M additional electric cars ... 1,000GW
Looks like you're off by an order of magnitude; that should be:
1kw (continuous) * 100M drivers = 100GW (continuous)
for the typical commuting patterns. That's a lot of power of course, I agree it would increase cumulative consumer demand for electricity by about 25%.
But the key is that this is nearly perfectly dispatchable demand. It won't cause anything like the same disruption to the grid as non-dispatchable, or even weakly dispatchable demand like air conditioning (which can flex how much is consumed briefly, but will annoy users if it varies across too long a time span).
This is key, plus I think we're overstating how fast this will happen.
In 2016 we're still at sub 1% of all new car sales being electric, at 0.9%. i.e. for every 100 cars we're adding to our roads, not even one full electric car is added. Not to mention about half of the electric cars are hybrids.
Average age of cars is about 12 years. So if the 1:99 ratio is overturned say in a decade to favour electric cars (which seems ambitious itself[0]), it'll take at least another decade to phase out existing cars and see the fleet get replaced by new, mostly electric.
So 10+ I think is conservative, it's probably 20+.
Another thing to mention is that we can generate a lot more electricity with our existing capacity than we do. Why don't we? Because at night the demand simply isn't there. But with a software-based transport & fueling system that EV offer, a lot of this extra demand can be shifted during times of low-demand, without needing to install extra capacity, but rather just not taking as much capacity offline nightly.
Finally, I cautiously expect a shift away from personal transport and public transport, but towards semi-public/personal. i.e., I'd be quite feasible if you could hail a self-driving pod in 20 years, get in, have your destination set via whatever has replaced our smartphone (e.g. software assistent), and get out, paying automatically, a la uber today. The pod drives according to your personal wishes, but it's part of a shared public transport system. I expect this to make driving safer and more fuel efficient in driving behaviour, more efficient in terms of capacity (no more 4-seater cars full of 1 person, no more driving around with vacation-level storage that's mostly empty on 9/10 trips), more efficient in terms of size (lighter vehicles, less crumple zone required). This shift too may significantly increase the km per kwh spent in the next few decades.
[0] As for whether electric becoming the majority of car sales within 10 or 20 years is feasible... a little context: it must be noted that the US sold 96k electric vehicles in 2013. In 2016 it's 157k. Growth rates are a little under 18% yoy. If you'd grow at 32% a year, which is twice the annual growth rate compared to the past few years, you'd sell 2.5 million electric vehicles in 2026, annually. But the US sells more than 17 million non-electrics annually today, so you're still not making a huge dent. That's a shitty calculation of course, but it's some context. Typical forecasts predict something like 30% of new car sales to be electric in 2030. Again, that's new sales. About 8% of cars are retired each year, if you replace them by 30% electric cars, it takes about a decade after 2030 to even get to 30% of the actual car fleet to be electric.
So all in all, I don't really think the grid is the biggest challenge here, although there are obviously very large investments to be made.
I hope it holds a great shift towards decentralization of energy production. Not complete decentralization, but a blend of massive power plants like today, and lots and lots of homes with solar panels on roof tops and the like.
I also hope fusion research is accelerated. Fusion in the sky, plus fusion down on Earth, that would cover a lot of bases. Portable fusion reactors would also truly open up the solar system - ride the fusion torch to your destination, power your habitat with fusion reactors.
An always-connected EV fleet can dispatch charging from a central load-leveling server, passing a percentage of the utility revenue along to incentivize the EV owner. Such a car would always Do The Right Thing(TM) with respect to TOU/tiered metering, real-time (or forecast) renewable generation, local distribution grid loading, and the availability of any extra baseload generation at night.
Personally I would want the option to always immediately charge the car to X miles of range (to drive to the local hospital), and to always charge to Y miles by Z:00 every day (for commuting). Subject to those constraints, the service provider is free to shift around the charging schedule to suit conditions on the local electric grid. The more leeway the service provider has to shift charging around, the more the EV owner earns.
Obviously Tesla is pursuing this, but I hope they have competition.
Good idea, but the infrastructure would have to be tied to the building, not to the companies operating in it. A lot of companies change offices all the time, and then there are all those small companies that can't afford to build this sort of thing.
So it would have to be part of regular infrastructure just like running water or comm/data lines.
Is there a "massive shift to electric cars within 10 years" ETF I can buy?
With the push for less nuclear, and less coal, all that's left is oil and natural gas. Renewable energy is no where near where it's necessary. So invest in companies that build windmills, solar, etc. But also natural gaz power plants.
Really the best investments are construction companies, and companies that manage and build the power grid infrastructure.
LNG is a big electricity creation fuel, escaping methane is the big pollution challenge.
Anyways, electric cars are made for renewables (sans hydro) and nuclear that provide energy when it might not be needed but can be used for charging batteries instead. Gas will fill in the gaps, but it's on demand nature means it doesn't really become more useful like the other sources do with car electrification.
Of course, if somebody in the Western world can figure out how to build a nuclear reactor on time with a competitive budget, nuclear may enter that mix of new construction. But right now, with the past decades' trends, it is not looking good for nuclear.
The bigger and engine is, the more efficient it typically is. Electric cars are already more clean even when you factor in the filthiest of power plants.
Petro companies will still do well though; we still need plastics, jet fuel, industrial chemicals, and even still gasoline, as it will be a byproduct of these other products. Lower demand for diesel and gasoline in cars could benefit transoceanic shipping and airline companies.
The "problem" with looking for good investments is that electric vehicles are fundamentally about conserving energy and materials, so after the electric car revolution there is going to be less economic activity than before.
Electric cars are heavier, and will cause more wear and tear on roads.
A typical engine of a comparable car weighs ballpark that in pounds (http://www.team.net/sol/tech/engine.html; links to better data welcome)
You have to add the weight of petrol to that (let's say 80 liters or 60kg). That's partly compensated by the weight of the electrical engine (70 pounds = 30kg) that you have to add to the Tesla.
=> all else being equal, the Tesla will be heavier.
However, 'All else being equal' currently is a bit debatable, I think. Tesla seems to have optimized further for weight than conventional manufacturers do.
The new Tesla Model 3 (with long range battery) has a curb weight of 3,814 lbs. [2]
Whats the big deal here?
1. http://www.whatiscurbweight.com/vehicle-weight/cadillac_curb...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_3
Even with charging stations, there is the question about how fast can recharge a battery without overheating it.
Charging at home is the least worrisome of all charging situations, because you can charge while you sleep and not care about how long it takes. Same with charging at shopping centres, restaurants, parks, hotels, etc., because you're going to spend the time doing the thing you went there to do anyway, regardless of whether you're charging or not.
The only time charging speed actually matters is when you're on a long road trip and need to keep moving. That's when you need a fast charging solution, like CHAdeMO or Tesla's Superchargers.
In the US, houses commonly have from the grid 100 A at 230 V. So, that is
100 x 230 = 23,000 W (Watts)
or 23 KW (kilowatts).
For an electric car with a 75 KWh battery, the charging time using all the house power would be
75 / 23 = 3.26
hours. Maybe the house needs also to use an electric stove, electric clothes dryer, air conditioning, a water pump, a microwave oven, some lights, etc. so wants to use only half the house power for the car charging in which case the charging time would be
75 / (23 / 2) = 6.52
hours.
From a Google search, supposedly at
https://www.tesla.com/models
is
"With unparalleled performance delivered through Tesla's unique, all-electric .... will achieve the maximum charge rate of 11.5 kW for 75 kWh configured vehicles."
Then the minimum charging time would be
75 / 11.5 = 6.52
hours.
So, net, for an electric car, I'd be concerned about charging time.
With a gasoline powered car, can fill up in a few minutes.
The demand for the US dollar worldwide is linked to oil and the 70s deal with the Saudis. This is a core component of US foreign policy that people like Gaddafi and Saddam found the hard way. US foreign policy is deeply linked to oil.
The middle east itself is a hotbed of political intrigue and geopolitical action since oil, and will lose this central role in the global sphere. Both of these will have far reaching consequences for global politics.
Half of the issue is almost solved: Range. But it has a couple of problems.
First, while the range of miles being able to be driven on a battery is now fairly large - upwards of 200+ miles - that still isn't quite comparable to the range an internal combustion engine can get. That value needs to double, if the car is to be used for more than general commuting (at least here in the United States, where the only way to go between cities cheaply and without hassle is to drive).
Some of this issue may be mitigated in the future - and other advances could help it with current technology for batteries; for instance, more power efficient motors would greatly assist in extending the range of current battery technology capabilities.
The second issue is Charging. For general commuting, this likely isn't an issue at all, even today. Just find a place to charge it, plug in, go into the office (or wherever). At home, plug it in, and it will be ready to leave again in the morning. But for long distance driving, assuming you have a place to recharge (let's suppose this is common in the future), you still have to wait a while to get a decent charge on the battery.
With an ICE, you can simply pull up, put some fuel in, and be gone in less than 5 minutes, depending on what you need. You can't do that currently with an electric vehicle. Instead, you need to wait around until it is recharged; if you have no reason to wait (like stopping for food or something), you are basically forced. For long distance driving, this has good and bad points, but sometimes you just want to fill the car up, get some snacks, and go.
Maybe the segment of the market that does longer drives is shrinking, or is already small enough not to matter? Maybe advances will help out here? Maybe car owners can add a "hybrid module" for long distance drives that incorporate an ICE/generator combo to keep the battery topped up as it is driven? Right now, the answers are unclear.
For those who are only going to and from work, maybe doing a bit of shopping, electric cars can make sense. For others, at best they'll be a secondary vehicle, or only used for going to work and back, with something else in the driveway for longer distances.
Lastly - there's the issue with the supply of lithium on the planet. I have read (I don't know the truth of this) that there isn't enough lithium available to support a large population all using electric vehicles. Perhaps we'll find other sources, or perhaps my information is out of date. Recycling will help too, most likely. Future battery technology may do away with the need for lithium. Lots of "ifs" here, but we may have an issue if we are sticking to lithium chemistry for power (given the reactivity of lithium vs other elements, this may not be possible - IIRC, elements that are more reactive than lithium have problems to them for the use of them in batteries).
I'm trying to think of how often in the last year I've needed more than 200 miles round trip in a single day where I didn't spend a significant % of the time that day in a metro.
Zero times.
Last 5 years, maybe once.
I live in Seattle, a rather remote city when it comes to Getting To Things To Do, but a 200 mile range brings me safely into another country with over 50 miles to spare. With less than 200 miles I can get to the next major metropolitan city (Portland), in the other direction. ~80 east or west get me to two of the most popular camping spots in the state.
Heading to Spokane is a problem however. For that I'd need almost 280 miles.
For reference, my compact 1.6L ICE gets ~250 miles out of a tank of gas. (Fill up is a lot faster though!)
For road tripping width-wise across the US, ICE is superior. But for the majority of commutes (30 miles round trip), an electric car can be plugged in a couple times per week and leave plenty left over for other activities.
Local generation can take up the slack too, with fewer volts being sent over wasteful energy grids - that can waste 6-7% of energy in transit, up to 30% in undeveloped countries.
I was concerned before I got my first electric car that the electricity bills would be massive. But I use the car every day, charge it at home 70% of the time and I have hardly noticed an increase in my bills.
I think the fear that the grid won't be able to cope is overblown. Especially in hotter countries where solar will have such a massive impact on transport.
In fact reducing oil consumption will only have benefits in remote locations where oil is very difficult to come by. Think about places where oil is a reason for war. No one will fight over the sunshine.
That should have been an easy calculation to at least get a ballpark figure of what to expect.
But I use the car every day, charge it at home 70% of the time and I have hardly noticed an increase in my bills.
Any decent charger should be able to tell you, once you tell it how much you pay for electricity, how much you spend each month to charge. For us, it's about $20/month compared to $60 or $70 for ICE. And that car never needs to spend time at a gas station, which once we owned an electric, is more of a hassle than I thought.
Unfortunately, we got rid of the Volt and I now ride my bike, so no charging and no Booster. The Prius tank now has to get below 0 on the gauge before either of us will find the time to go out of our way to a gas station.
Personally I use 3500 kwh per year in my house. I would notice the bill going up. But I would also notice a bill disappearing all together.
My bills have not really shifted - there may be an increase as the battery becomes less effective, and as winter sets in - but I'm due a new car in 8 months - as the pcp deal I have runs out then.
a lot of countries are more densely packed or have governments that can just arbitrarily enact new laws.