California is currently having power outages with no severe weather and rather mild temperature today. Electric vehicles make a lot of sense for driving in cities but how are they planning on providing the power for EVs without building a lot more power generation than they currently seem willing to do?
https://poweroutage.us/area/state/california
I've seen conflicting reports on California's ability to generate enough electricity to sustain the rising demand for EVs and so far it seems the politicians are just wanting to push that problem off until it becomes an unsustainable emergency.
It does not appear that these outages are due to load, so I do not follow how they are relevant to a discussion of the supply required for EVs. Perhaps a separate discussion of how PG&E sucks? (And maybe SDPL and SCE too?)
The only solution to increased demand requirements is to build more generation. I do not know what you are referring to with “currently willing to do,” but whoever needs to be willing in order to build more generation will certainly become willing at some point.
From that power outage map, I see only a couple of areas with outages and only affecting about 5K homes. Nothing that indicates demand shortages. In our area we get that sometimes when the wind blows down a couple of trees.
Why do you assume that anyone is expecting EVs to arrive without needing additional electrical generation capacity? That makes no sense.
People over estimate the impact of EVs on the grid, Even after EVs have reached 18% of vehicle sales in CA, they use less than 1% of the power produced. It will be at least a decade before most cars might be EVs. That is enough time to increase the power generation capacity.
“Though California has more electric cars than any other state, they make up just .4% of all energy consumption during peak hours. Even at 2030 estimates, some 5.6 million electric cars, trucks, and vans would only comprise 4% of peak loads.”
https://www.autoblog.com/2022/10/16/electric-cars-power-grid...
> California is currently having power outages with no severe weather and rather mild temperature today
You posted this 20 minutes ago. I followed your link and it shows that ~1% of customers tracked are without power. This could be due to any number of reasons but it’s not like this is anywhere near catastrophic.
Grid issues tend to be related to huge spikes in usage or significant acute damage to supply. EVs don’t need to be charged constantly and therefore can be charged in a way that smooths out demand.
Oh you got me. CA is actually awash in extra power and those rolling blackouts, poorly maintained equipment causing power line fires every year killing hundreds, burning thousands of acres is all an extremist conspiracy theory. Carry on.
You refer to issues that are all within the past five years, not decades. The last significant problems before these were in 2000 & 2001, which were due to artificial shortages created by Enron, not physical infrastructure problems, had huge political implications, and which led to the development of the current resource adequacy program used in CA. (Which has generally worked pretty well but has been too slow in adapting to rapidly rising amount generation from solar).
But I misread your comment and thought you were talking about significant unmet electrical demand rather than deficiencies in the reliability & safety of the grid. (The late summer grid problems in the past 3 years are partially due to insufficient supply, but require only 1% or so additional supply in the critical hours of the day and CA is building to address that.)
In short, I don’t believe that chronic insufficient demand is a tenable political and economic position (even in CA…) and do not expect it to be tolerated and not fixed.
As much as I like making fun of PG&E, EV's really aren't going to knock over the California power grid. As it is, they have to limit the amount of solar people put on their roofs to keep there from being too much surplus electricity during the day.
I don't see any outages on the map you linked. However I think this is a case where, believe it or not, the invisible hand is going to do the right thing. Most (all?) electric cars have settings to prioritize charging in the daytime or late night, when TOU power is the cheapest (the grid is most stressed around 5-9pm, when solar is less productive but demand is still high).
So in other words, just as with nearly all new car technology advancements, it starts out with luxury vehicles and then gradually moves down the price ranges?
Is it supposed to be magically different than normal car development progression?
Not at all. I've been looking at new cars lately and I'm amazed at how many new EV's are on the market. I am definitely not looking in the luxury segment :-)
Yeah EV tech moving down the cost ladder seems to be happening on the quicker side of things.
I’m not certain that that particular comment was being the price up as a critique against EVs, but I’ve seen many people make it and it just makes no logical sense to me. It feels like a willfully deceitful argument the way it’s often presented.
The other argument about not having enough charging is weird too.
It would be similar to advocating against the original iPhone when it was introduced by arguing there were not already external iphone protective covers in present existence to cover the future demand for the next five years. It totally reversed how things work.
> The other argument about not having enough charging is weird too
This actually is a bit of a concern for me. I live in a single-family home, so charging at home isn't an issue, but I am in a rural area so charging infrastructure in the places I'm likely to go is something to think about.
I'm more likely to buy a lightly-used ICE car now and an EV in a few years after the market matures a bit more.
Set the filter to 3-22kW or so, and in Europe at least you will see a lot of on-street chargers. London especially.
In some places they are added to street lights, since those had a thick cable for the old sodium lights but don't need the power any more for LED lighting. In others, it's a new post between two parking spaces.
It’s not a totally unreasonable consideration when making an individual personal choice, but it’s when making an argument against policies and the industry as a whole that the charger access contention is wrongheaded.
Increased demand is what will drive a fast charger buildout and better charging infrastructure for apartments.
An economy EV typically has quite high specifications though. For example Mini electric has similar specifications and performance to the Mini Cooper S models.
The other element is total cost of ownership. Fuel and servicing an EV is white a bit less expensive.
I'd be more curious to see EV adoption superimposed on single/duplex housing vs multi-tenant housing (such as apartments.) I'd bet a lot of the recent adoption is in the former areas where people can install chargers.
Like the article says, 2023 is going to be a big year in the S-curve for EV adoption.
CA gas prices are >$5 / gallon (1.33€ / liter). An extra $1,500 / year cost for average ICE over EV.
There's a burgeoning market of increasingly affordable options, many with an extra $7.5k off in 2023:
$25k Chevy Bolt
$28k Nissan Leaf
$30k Chevy Equinox EV
$34k Hyundai Kona EV
$37k VW ID.4
$40k Chevy Silverado EV
$41k Kia EV6
$42k Toyota bZ4x
I'm seeing more and more people who would've abhorred gas-savers like the Prius 5 years ago, now looking to purchase an EV. I'd easily expect to see 30% of new CA car sales be EV in 2023, with another 30% hybrid. It's going to be quite brutal for the auto mfg that are practically ICE-only: Dodge, Chrysler, Subaru, Mazda, etc.
I bought a used EV for $22K earlier this year. If gas drops to $5/gallon and stays there (and my commute stays similar) it will completely pay for itself in about 5 years, on saved gasoline alone.
The same used EV is $28K these days. I get the impression that no one can keep electric vehicles in stock (used or new).
A year ago I was on the market for a new car, and went to several dealerships across some of the more affluent suburbs of Chicago, looking to get a plug-in hybrid SUV, and was literally laughed at by a couple of salesmen at different dealerships, and told those cars only get sent to the coasts, none get sent to the Midwest (I think one said they got two sent to their dealership the past year. Just two). I was even told they've heard of some people make trips to the coasts just so they can buy those cars. I'm not willing to do that myself.
We ended up leasing a non-plug-in hybrid and are hoping things will be easier when the lease expires.
Electric sedans are a bit more common and easier to get around here, but my partner really wanted an SUV, in part because it makes long trips possible, especially to more rural areas, like many places around Lake Superior, where we vacationed a couple of months ago. I don't think I saw a single public EV plugin while we were up there.
California also has stronger fleet emissions requirements, etc. Manufacturers prioritize sending to California due to a combination of proactive government policy, a large market, and interested consumers.
Also the feedback loop of the charging network good enough for X% => more EVs get bought => more charger demand => more chargers get built => charging network now good enough for X+Y%.
It's so funny, I recently moved to Chicago and I feel like every other car on the street is a Tesla. The garage in my apartment building has 11 of them.
I wonder if there's more of an uptick in the city proper than the suburbs (which feels unintuitive since you figure parking/charging is easier in garages)
Eighteen-percenter here. Made the decision the next car was going to be all-electric. Ended up going with a Chevrolet Bolt EUV. Prices are already competing with gas (compare 2023 All-Electric Bolt EV with, say, a 2023 Honda Civic Sedan) even before the rebates. And Chevy pays for the installation of the level 2 charging outlet; the installer had it down to a science: "I'm doing ten of these a week."
It's such a better driving experience. Untethered from buying gas, I'm now astonished how much infrastructure is dedicated to internal combustion vehicles.
It's amazing how a banal headline like this, which really does not say much, can trigger correlation vs causation debates. It causes the reader to project his/her beliefs into it -- if you're pro-ev: "great! More works needs to be done!" If you're pro-gas: "You see, it's coastal elites buying EVs." From my perspective it's a neutral headline that creates debate due to the superimposition of beliefs from different parties. The questions I get from reading this headline include:
- Why is there a such a large disparity between California vs "rest of US"?
- What makes people think that it's obvious for California to have more EVs than other states?
- what are the contributing factors to people buying more new cars in California?
- what's the ratio of new evs bought vs used evs? How does that compare to the number of used cars sold?
- how has this proportion changed over time?
- what is the rate of growth of sales in new evs in California vs rest of US? Are there states with higher growth of sales vs previous (ratio vs total)?
>> What makes people think that it's obvious for California to have more EVs than other states?
There are reports that EVs experience degraded performance in low temperatures.
If this is true it seems reasonable to expect that in geographies with considerably lower seasonal temperatures than California, at least some folks would be motivated away from EVs due to this alone.
One thing that people severely underestimate is the amount of energy that goes to climate control. I find that it's about 15% of my energy consumption (which dovetails with your numbers).
In Europe the further you go north, the likelihood that a car is electric increases. That is simply because people can afford it and there is a government willing to incentivise it.
>> Why is there a such a large disparity between California vs "rest of US"?
I just moved back to CA from the eastern midwest. I pay $1.50-$2 a gallon more for gas than I did in the East. At that increased price, it starts to make sense to consider EV+solar if you are commuting 50-100mi a day.
The disparity for cali is partially that all the manufacturers are sending their evs to California before other states. So simply an availability problem.
Pretty soon the sales rate of EVs will level off because they haven’t gotten landlords of apartments to install battery chargers yet.
It doesn’t evn make sense to be having power companies installing megawatt battery pack substations then have millions of Private EV chargers due to poor efficiency loss.
I live in an older apartment building so it's not an option for me unless I want to plan my life around finding places to charge the EV.
I can move to a "luxury" apt with EV charging, but I'm not keen on moving and paying 50% more rent just for this reason.
Tried a few times to buy a house but laughably outbid by double income/tech (Bay Area).
So I continue to drive my invincible 1999 Chevy that gets 30 mpg.
I suspect many apartment dwellers like me would love to buy an EV if we could charge it where it's parked, or were able to buy a house despite our sub-500k/yr compensation so we could install a charger.
Most of this is supply imho. Manufacturers are selling EVs with months or years long waiting lists and would be selling a lot more if they had inventory anywhere. And then also more go to CA because of CARB laws, leaving a select few for the rest of the country.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI've seen conflicting reports on California's ability to generate enough electricity to sustain the rising demand for EVs and so far it seems the politicians are just wanting to push that problem off until it becomes an unsustainable emergency.
https://www.kpbs.org/news/environment/2022/09/19/california-...
https://reason.com/2022/09/09/california-demands-evs-but-can...
It does not appear that these outages are due to load, so I do not follow how they are relevant to a discussion of the supply required for EVs. Perhaps a separate discussion of how PG&E sucks? (And maybe SDPL and SCE too?)
The only solution to increased demand requirements is to build more generation. I do not know what you are referring to with “currently willing to do,” but whoever needs to be willing in order to build more generation will certainly become willing at some point.
Why do you assume that anyone is expecting EVs to arrive without needing additional electrical generation capacity? That makes no sense.
There has been a lot of discussion and planning around expanding generation. Here is one: The Biden administration just announced the first-ever California offshore wind lease sale https://electrek.co/2022/10/18/us-california-offshore-wind-l...
People over estimate the impact of EVs on the grid, Even after EVs have reached 18% of vehicle sales in CA, they use less than 1% of the power produced. It will be at least a decade before most cars might be EVs. That is enough time to increase the power generation capacity.
“Though California has more electric cars than any other state, they make up just .4% of all energy consumption during peak hours. Even at 2030 estimates, some 5.6 million electric cars, trucks, and vans would only comprise 4% of peak loads.” https://www.autoblog.com/2022/10/16/electric-cars-power-grid...
The big question is whether charging times overlap with renewable electricity generation.
You posted this 20 minutes ago. I followed your link and it shows that ~1% of customers tracked are without power. This could be due to any number of reasons but it’s not like this is anywhere near catastrophic.
Grid issues tend to be related to huge spikes in usage or significant acute damage to supply. EVs don’t need to be charged constantly and therefore can be charged in a way that smooths out demand.
The peak demand is caused when everyone's AC kicks on at once during heat waves.
Electric cars can easily be charged off-peak; even my ten year old model has a "timer" function to delay charging.
You refer to issues that are all within the past five years, not decades. The last significant problems before these were in 2000 & 2001, which were due to artificial shortages created by Enron, not physical infrastructure problems, had huge political implications, and which led to the development of the current resource adequacy program used in CA. (Which has generally worked pretty well but has been too slow in adapting to rapidly rising amount generation from solar).
But I misread your comment and thought you were talking about significant unmet electrical demand rather than deficiencies in the reliability & safety of the grid. (The late summer grid problems in the past 3 years are partially due to insufficient supply, but require only 1% or so additional supply in the critical hours of the day and CA is building to address that.)
In short, I don’t believe that chronic insufficient demand is a tenable political and economic position (even in CA…) and do not expect it to be tolerated and not fixed.
Is it supposed to be magically different than normal car development progression?
I’m not certain that that particular comment was being the price up as a critique against EVs, but I’ve seen many people make it and it just makes no logical sense to me. It feels like a willfully deceitful argument the way it’s often presented.
The other argument about not having enough charging is weird too.
It would be similar to advocating against the original iPhone when it was introduced by arguing there were not already external iphone protective covers in present existence to cover the future demand for the next five years. It totally reversed how things work.
This actually is a bit of a concern for me. I live in a single-family home, so charging at home isn't an issue, but I am in a rural area so charging infrastructure in the places I'm likely to go is something to think about.
I'm more likely to buy a lightly-used ICE car now and an EV in a few years after the market matures a bit more.
Set the filter to 3-22kW or so, and in Europe at least you will see a lot of on-street chargers. London especially.
In some places they are added to street lights, since those had a thick cable for the old sodium lights but don't need the power any more for LED lighting. In others, it's a new post between two parking spaces.
Increased demand is what will drive a fast charger buildout and better charging infrastructure for apartments.
The other element is total cost of ownership. Fuel and servicing an EV is white a bit less expensive.
CA gas prices are >$5 / gallon (1.33€ / liter). An extra $1,500 / year cost for average ICE over EV.
There's a burgeoning market of increasingly affordable options, many with an extra $7.5k off in 2023:
$25k Chevy Bolt
$28k Nissan Leaf
$30k Chevy Equinox EV
$34k Hyundai Kona EV
$37k VW ID.4
$40k Chevy Silverado EV
$41k Kia EV6
$42k Toyota bZ4x
I'm seeing more and more people who would've abhorred gas-savers like the Prius 5 years ago, now looking to purchase an EV. I'd easily expect to see 30% of new CA car sales be EV in 2023, with another 30% hybrid. It's going to be quite brutal for the auto mfg that are practically ICE-only: Dodge, Chrysler, Subaru, Mazda, etc.
The same used EV is $28K these days. I get the impression that no one can keep electric vehicles in stock (used or new).
A year ago I was on the market for a new car, and went to several dealerships across some of the more affluent suburbs of Chicago, looking to get a plug-in hybrid SUV, and was literally laughed at by a couple of salesmen at different dealerships, and told those cars only get sent to the coasts, none get sent to the Midwest (I think one said they got two sent to their dealership the past year. Just two). I was even told they've heard of some people make trips to the coasts just so they can buy those cars. I'm not willing to do that myself.
We ended up leasing a non-plug-in hybrid and are hoping things will be easier when the lease expires.
Electric sedans are a bit more common and easier to get around here, but my partner really wanted an SUV, in part because it makes long trips possible, especially to more rural areas, like many places around Lake Superior, where we vacationed a couple of months ago. I don't think I saw a single public EV plugin while we were up there.
I wonder if there's more of an uptick in the city proper than the suburbs (which feels unintuitive since you figure parking/charging is easier in garages)
It's such a better driving experience. Untethered from buying gas, I'm now astonished how much infrastructure is dedicated to internal combustion vehicles.
- Why is there a such a large disparity between California vs "rest of US"?
- What makes people think that it's obvious for California to have more EVs than other states?
- what are the contributing factors to people buying more new cars in California?
- what's the ratio of new evs bought vs used evs? How does that compare to the number of used cars sold?
- how has this proportion changed over time?
- what is the rate of growth of sales in new evs in California vs rest of US? Are there states with higher growth of sales vs previous (ratio vs total)?
There are reports that EVs experience degraded performance in low temperatures.
If this is true it seems reasonable to expect that in geographies with considerably lower seasonal temperatures than California, at least some folks would be motivated away from EVs due to this alone.
Location: New England.
One thing that people severely underestimate is the amount of energy that goes to climate control. I find that it's about 15% of my energy consumption (which dovetails with your numbers).
I just moved back to CA from the eastern midwest. I pay $1.50-$2 a gallon more for gas than I did in the East. At that increased price, it starts to make sense to consider EV+solar if you are commuting 50-100mi a day.
It doesn’t evn make sense to be having power companies installing megawatt battery pack substations then have millions of Private EV chargers due to poor efficiency loss.
It still doesn't scale.
I can move to a "luxury" apt with EV charging, but I'm not keen on moving and paying 50% more rent just for this reason.
Tried a few times to buy a house but laughably outbid by double income/tech (Bay Area).
So I continue to drive my invincible 1999 Chevy that gets 30 mpg.
I suspect many apartment dwellers like me would love to buy an EV if we could charge it where it's parked, or were able to buy a house despite our sub-500k/yr compensation so we could install a charger.