First Electric Cars Have Power Industry Worried 450
Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Fahey writes for AP that as the first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, the power industry faces a huge growth opportunity, with SoCal Edison expecting to be charging 100,000 cars by 2015 and California setting a goal of 1 million electric vehicles by 2020. But utility executives are worried that the difficulty of keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers — and their neighbors — could slow the growth of this industry because it's inevitable that electric utilities will suffer some difficulties early on. 'We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,' says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America. When plugged into a home charging station the first Leafs and Volts will draw 3,300 Watts and take about 8 hours to deliver a full charge, but both carmakers may soon boost that to 6,600 Watts. The Tesla Roadster, an electric sports car with a huge battery, can draw 16,800 Watts. That means that adding an electric vehicle or two to a neighborhood can be like adding another house, and it can stress the equipment that services those houses. The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts so the extra stress on a transformer from one or two electric vehicles could cause it to overheat and fail, knocking out power to the block."
These numbers don't make sense. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that transformers that distribute power from the electrical grid to homes are often designed to handle less than about 12,000 watts
often designed to handle 12,000 watts? Hogwash. That's 50 amp service (in North America, where homes are almost always supplied at 240VAC). Most new homes in North America receives at minimum 200 amp service. Even my rural 1956 rancher has 70 amp service.
And this is a single home. Most transformers supply several houses. If there are any transformers rated at 12KW, they are very few and far between, and probably service locations that aren't likely to have electric cars anyhow.
And? (Score:4, Informative)
Shoulda thought of that several years ago when you started pushing electric cars, and I would blame the car manufacturers and electric stations equally - if you have 100amps into the house, you should be able to pull 100 amps. If you don't, then you need to contact the electricity company who are then suitably forewarned. Also, the car companies never mention just how much power a car pulls (but yet we're told to worry about 40W bulbs being on for five minutes more than usual!) or that it might need specialised equipment to charge.
I worked in an inner-city school a few years back. We blew the street fuse by plugging in a laptop trolley with 16 90W adaptors. Did we blame the laptop manufacturer's? The school electrician? No, we blamed the electricity company for being so stupid that the *specified* maximum current available for our site was nowhere near what blew the street fuse for the ENTIRE street.
Sort it out, like you should have always have sorted it out. And charge people more if they place a burden on your system and make them get specialised lines that cost more. Problem solved (and it'll also keep electric cars in the bin where they should be - what we *really* need from an ecological point of view is a lithium shortage right now).
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
You mean Enron?
Re:These numbers don't make sense. (Score:3, Informative)
Whats the difference between your car sucking power hour after hour and your air conditioner along with many other devices running all summer/winter?
There's no difference. The problem is adding electric car chargers on top of all that other stuff that's already running.
Time to refit your house (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming the cars charge with 220v, this represents 15 amperes, 30 amperes and around 75 amperes. Most houses will have a 15 amp circuit available - probably you have some appliance plugged into it. Not all that many will have an extra 30 amp circuit, and none have a 75 amp circuit anywhere.
As far as the worries of the power companies: if the greens were serious, they would get behind this. Of course, if you want to reduce our usage of oil, we do need a few new power plants. Nuclear would be best, but even if you try to go full-on green, the eco-nuts will [mojavedesertblog.com] oppose [calfinder.com] them [mojavedesertblog.com] all [wordpress.com]. Don't bother asking what they would support - most of them apparently think that power magically comes out of the wall-socket, with no need for nasty things like power plants...
Re:Good! (Score:3, Informative)
Whatever happened to the new power grid that President Bush promised before and again after the great American blackout of 2003?
https://www.ferc.gov/eventcalendar/Files/20050608125055-grid-2030.pdf [ferc.gov]
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,94872,00.html [foxnews.com]
Re:Worried? (Score:5, Informative)
Spot on here!
The trouble is the distribution. I don't know about the voltages used in the states, but often the electricity is transformed down to 33/11kV, because these voltages are rather simply run underground. So in the average distribution network, you hit a number of (down-)transformers and a number of (underground) cabling until the 3x400V reach the client. It would cost billions to rip it out and put back another one that supports charging of electric cars.
The trouble is also in the distribution with respect to daytime. Some might think, that they already use a high energy load, maybe even 3, 6 or 12 kW; and 'what is the difference?'. The difference is that until now, high loads are somewhat randomly distributed over time, and usually run for short time-spans. So a 12 kW load runs from 8-9 here, and another one maybe 2-4 there.
But think about it: In future when the working population comes home in the evenings, they will want to recharge their cars for the trip to work next morning. Unfortunately, evenings are already the times of highest load in residential areas: lighting, heating, air-co, ovens, you name it.
And it would be very wrong to blame the situation on some '50 year old hardware' or so. It could not be more wrong. The distribution networks were simply not designed with recharging of electric cars at homes in mind; and even less with additional loads correlating with already peak hours.
Who didn't see this coming? (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't surprise me at all that electric companies oversubscribe their service and count on individual homes pulling relatively low loads. It makes sense - that is what causes brownouts and the need for electric companies to drop neighborhoods out so they can keep from overstressing transmission lines and such. If electric companies didn't oversubscribe their service there would not be brownouts.
It's high load in the residential areas that will make it important for people to supplement the grid with local power generation with things like solar panels. The problem there is that the electric vehicles will generally be somewhere else during the day. The efficiency isn't completely lost, though, and solar panels in a neighborhood are generally much closer to the local industrial loads than the power plants.
But this is going to be the kicker to help get people to put up panels. It will be distributed power generation and will help the grid deal with the much higher loads that electric vehicles will impose.
Re:And? (Score:5, Informative)
"and it'll also keep electric cars in the bin where they should be - what we *really* need from an ecological point of view is a lithium shortage right now"
WTF? There's NO shortage of lithium whatsoever. Absolutely NONE.
You can mine it indefinitely from seawater for about $70 per kg. Ecological footprint of lithium mining is also trivial - it's mined from salt planes which are not known for their rich ecology.
Re:These numbers don't make sense. (Score:3, Informative)
And now for something intelligent because your a moron.
his a moron what?
Re:Good! (Score:4, Informative)
My house has a single phase, 100kW maximum supply, this is pretty normal in the UK.
No it isn't, I think you are confusing amps with kilowatts. Typical in the UK is about 60A-100A single phase which at 240V works out to 14-24KW
100KW would be about 400A single phase or 138A three phase.
Solar (Score:2, Informative)
Many of the type of folks who would buy an electric car at this early stage are the same type of folks who will also add solar or wind power to their home so that they can generate their own "gas".
My solar panels cover my electrical usage pretty much 100% to charge my Tesla Roadster, along with the rest of my house. Power Utility optional (but nice to have as a back up). System more than pays for itself when charging an electric car and preventing brownouts from popping my computers and electrical equipment.
Many of the other Tesla owners I know have added solar to their houses, as did many of the EV1 owners and original RAV4EV owners. I expect a large percentage of Volt and Leaf owners will do this as well.
Re:What's old is new again (Score:3, Informative)
I'll give you some reasons.
(1) Railway locomotives don't use electric transmissions because they're efficient. They use them because it is physically impossible (or at least impractical) to build a 44,000 hp mechanical transmission into a moving vehicle.
(2) Until recently the size, cost and efficiency of electric transmissions (including motors, generators, and control electronics) have made it impractical to include all of them plus a gas engine in vehicles much smaller than railway locomotives.
(3) The Volt actually does exactly what you are talking about--the gas engine is undersized, and when the battery is low, it runs the generator to exactly match the demand of the drive motor. The only exception is when you go faster than 65 mph, where a clutch engages and the gas engine drives the wheels directly--but only because at that speed the gas engine is already at its peak efficiency point and using the electric transmission would be a waste. The reason the Volt has batteries (for regenerative braking and precharging) is because you don't gain that much just by using an electric transmission.
V2G (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the scenario in a nut-shell. California began full-on price fixing because they decided energy prices were too high, causing a long term shortage of supply (nobody wanted to build new power plants in california, nor sell power at below market prices to california's distributors.)
In response to this shortage, they deregulated energy production in the hopes that this would spur more in-state production, which it did. The problem was that they continued to price-fix the distributors, so the old and new in-state energy producers sold to out-of-state markets first..
The shortages grew worse and worse because of this. The in-state distributors, forced to buy at market prices but sell at lower fixed prices, began losing money hand-over-fist. The state then responded by heavily subsidizing the distributors through taxes but even that wasnt enough to save some of the them from bankruptcy.
This is the same old "manage from the top" good-intentions failure we often see.
Re:Good! (Score:3, Informative)
California was in trouble before the deregulation, which is why they "deregulated."
Re:Lights out at night (Score:1, Informative)
unfortunately that is incorrect. If left alone, most charging will be done immediately after people get home from work. At that time power usage in a residential area is already at a peak.
For each individual this makes sense, nobody will want to postpone charging until the night because a car with an empty battery is useless. People will want a full battery asap, just in case they need to go out later that evening.
This can not be compensated by low business usage because businesses are usually in different areas which do not share the same local power infrastructure. And it is that infrastructure where the capacity problem is, not in the power production.
The only solution is a very expensive upgrade of the power infrastructure or time of day based electricity pricing (most expensive in the evening), or a combination of these.
Re:Good! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually 200 amp (and even 400 amp) 240v entries became features in plenty of new houses in Quebec when power rates were so low that electric heating (even heating an outdoor pool in the winter) was the cheapest way to go.
Nobody bothered putting in "just" 100 amp entries unless they were aiming for the lowest price point.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
Funny how you leave out the biggest piece of this: Enron. The deregulation allowed Enron to manipulate power supplies and prices. So your "scenario in a nut-shell" is using a nut that selectively includes in its narrative only the government as a player, despite that private industry was as much or more at the center of the story as government practices, that the private industry was in large extent crooked, and that deregulation on the government's side was essential to the run-away crookedness on the private industries' side which resulted in, for example, brownouts when totally operational power plants were turned off in order to raise the spot-market prices from the electrical generators which were still on line - putting billions into Enron's pockets, as well as into the pockets of several of it peers.
Re:it says right here "200 amps" (Score:3, Informative)
You certainly should be able to draw 200A from any 200A residential electrical service that is in good operating condition.
However, if all the homes on your block try to do so simultaneously, you will hear a loud bang as the fuse on the primary side of the distribution transformer opens, and you and your neighbors will be sitting in the dark waiting for the power company to come out to change it.
Residential services are not fused individually, except by the main breaker in each service panel. The final overcurrent device before the power hits your home is on the high voltage primary side of the step-down transformer, which typically feeds anywhere from several homes to an entire block.
Re:Good! (Score:1, Informative)
Like others said, Enron maybe? I mean you do remember the reports that came out months (maybe a year) later where Enron employees were found to be calling power plants and having them limit power output so as to increase the cost (and their profit). Back during the crisis, people were talking about how this would happen for years to come, but that never materialized. But then again, Enron went bankrupt due to various other schemes.
I'm all for the free market - I just don't think it works too well when there is only one way of getting something that is a necessity, in this case it is a single power line running up to my house, or a single gas line running up to my house.
Re:Lights out at night (Score:3, Informative)
And when the demand is low, plants are shut down (extending their service life and reducing the amount of maintenance required). If demand goes up, then service life is expended faster and more in depth and frequent maintenance is required.
TANSTAAFL.
Overselling capacity makes sense (Score:3, Informative)
So they oversell electric capacity just like they oversell bandwidth?
Yes. Someone long ago [wikipedia.org] found that it's not really necessary to have capacity to handle all possible requests at once, because not everybody uses the system at once [wikipedia.org].
That's why you and everybody else is able to afford to have a telephone. You would be surprised to find how much it costs [shopfort1online.com] to have available at all times the maximum capacity you bought.
When the statistics of the system change, you need new formulas to calculate both the needed capacity and the prices the service will cost. This will happen with the power utilities when electric cars become popular, just as it happened with the phone service when people started buying their first 2400bps modems a quarter of a century ago to access CompuServe.
Re:Good! (Score:3, Informative)
What do you mean by "was" the way to go? AFAIK electric heating is still the cheapest solution in Quebec.
Do you want to compare bills? It's nowhere near equal.
http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/residential/personal/compare-heating-costs.cfm?attr=4#changeSource [nrcan.gc.ca]
Gaz Mets' last bill was 28.3 cents per cubic meter (including the 4% "green fund"), for 37.3 mJ of energy in each cubic meter.
Hydro quebec rate D (domestic) is 7.5 cents/kwh. for 3.6 mJ of energy.
In other words, the same 37.3 mJ would have cost almost 80 cents, not 28.3 cents.
Hydro can be cheaper IF:
But for a straight-up resistive (baseboard) heating system. you're paying more. Lots more.
And it gets worse if you suck lots of juice, because you'll pay higher Hydro rates.
Re:Lights out at night (Score:3, Informative)
Wear and tear is a variable cost. Charging an electric car is added revenue. If the added revenue isn't greater than the variable cost (wear and tear plus fuel more or less) then the electric company indeed has a big problem.
Variable time-of-day pricing relies on shifting loads (running the drier, the washer, the dishwasher as well as commercial users) from day to night to use generators that would otherwise be shut down.
Re:Worried? (Score:4, Informative)
Fair enough; see Debunking the Myth of EVs and Smokestacks [ourenergypolicy.org] for one source. I'll be citing numbers from that same paper below.
With respect to pollution, switching to grid power dramatically reduces hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide (to the tune of >95%), substantially reduces nitrogen oxides, and will substantially increase sulpher oxide and particulate output in countries (including both the US and UK) where coal- and oil-fired plants are common (while reducing them in other areas such as France and Japan).
Overall efficiency, by contrast, is far less ambiguous: Electric vehicles themselves get about 88% efficiency; after taking into account power plant efficiency, transmission efficiency and charging losses, that number goes down to 28% overall -- but this is still wildly favorable to 14% overall (15% vehicle efficiency, 8% losses during the refining process) for internal combustion engines.
This is still wildly expensive in terms of BTUs-per-mile compared to simply using lighter and more-efficient vehicles [google.com]... but eh, gotta' start somewhere. :)
Feel free to present your own, competing sources.