Electric Cars Won't Strain the Power Grid 438
thecarchik writes "Last week's heat wave prompted another eruption of that perennial question: Won't electric cars that recharge from grid power overload the nation's electricity system? The short answer is no. A comprehensive and wide-ranging two-volume study from 2007, Environmental Assessment of Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles, looked at the impact of plug-in vehicles on the US electrical grid. It also analyzed the 'wells-to-wheels' carbon emissions of plug-ins versus gasoline cars. The load of one plug-in recharging (about 2 kilowatts) is roughly the same as that of four or five plasma television sets. Plasma TVs hardly brought worries about grid crashes."
What if... (Score:5, Funny)
No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.)
If they decide to charge during the day (for example, if people charge them at work), it could strain the grid. Particularly if they charge during hot summer afternoons.
Unless a significant part of the grid goes to solar, which produces the highest power during the daytime at summer, of course.
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you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it
Not sure how that works. Is there a dummy load set up somewhere? In reality I expect the peak load generators to shut down at night and base load generators to shut down as much as they can. I assume that low load conditions would lead to problems keeping generators in phase.
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
Is there a dummy load set up somewhere?
Sort of. What happens is the power company almost gives away the power between midnight and 5am to industrial customers and large cities with *lots* of street lights. Nuclear power plants in particular run extremely poorly at anything under 90% of what they're rated to run at, whereas natural gas generators, hydro, etc can be scaled forward and back.
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:4, Interesting)
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/sudden-surplus-calls-for-quick-thinking/ [nytimes.com]
Columbia is accustomed to reducing power to 85 percent and sometimes 60 percent. In the following days, however, BPA asked the nuclear [note: I added "nuclear" for context] plant operators to go down to just 22 percent. “This year was extraordinary because it all came so heavy and so fast,’’ Mr. Milstein said.
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes you end up having to scale your nuclear plant back because there's so much renewable energy:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/sudden-surplus-calls-for-quick-thinking/ [nytimes.com]
Columbia is accustomed to reducing power to 85 percent and sometimes 60 percent. In the following days, however, BPA asked the nuclear [note: I added "nuclear" for context] plant operators to go down to just 22 percent. “This year was extraordinary because it all came so heavy and so fast,’’ Mr. Milstein said.
Here by renewable energy, you mean hydroelectricity. And they had an excess due to larger than normal amount of rain. And the reason why they had an excess of electricity was because they lacked the transmission capacity to sell the power to other areas where it was needed.
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
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You need a flywheel the size of the Library of Congress to do any grid scale peak power. Flywheels work best in data center UPS applications, replacing a room full of batteries.
finally an analogy we can ALL understand...
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the true future "green" tech that will solve our energy problems.
Our true energy problem isn't production it is storage. Can you imagine if every home had a block that could store enough electricity for 6 hours of running their entire house(more if you turned off the stove and heaters) You could use Solar/wind power to trickle charge it and the mains to keep it full up when you needed to at night.
Small businesses would also benefit greatly. It would stabilize the overall grid, brown outs would all be gone and blackouts would only be caused by long term effects(like a major storm) not too many air conditionaers
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Interesting)
I am an engineering for a large utility in the US, granted Civil not Electrical, but the principal for generation is:
You produce a little spare power that is grounded to handle increases (your buffer)
There are voltage regulators and capacitor banks at substations to handle small variations in load
Utilize peaking stations when the load on the grid is particularly high
The key for generation: RPM of the turbine, as load on the grid decreases it take less energy to maintain the speed of the turbine; so while a turbine may still be spinning at the same speed during high and low demand it is certainly not consuming as much fuel
With that being said, there is certainly a lag between the consumption of fuel and the utilization of that energy (steam to mechanical motion) that may produce a delay of an hour as load decreases. Utility companies have a great deal of data and they can generally predict when usage will change and adjust the fuel consumption accordingly.
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that the rant in the parent post had nothing whatsoever to do with the text he had quoted, it seems that we have a trollbot in our hands, since a human troll wouldn't bother quoting. Any guesses if this is a new algorithm or the return of some classic? Or just some kind of randomly posting spambot?
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I hate to break this to you, mister racist teabagger, but welfare as an entitlement ended in 1996. You can't even get food stamps in most states unless you work. These days only the rich get welfare.
Too bad they can't mod you down any farther.
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If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.)
Actually you can. You turn off four plants and keep two at half load. When there is a surge then the two plants can handle it, and when the surge is sustained then you turn on another plant.
But typically turning on the plant off and on costs more than keeping it on in the first place, so you just add incandescent light bulbs all over the power plant to use as much as running the plant at the minimum produces.
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But typically turning on the plant off and on costs more than keeping it on in the first place, so you just add incandescent light bulbs all over the power plant to use as much as running the plant at the minimum produces.
Surely thats a joke. I could believe hydroelectric storage: pump water against gravity, or selling the power to a neighboring network.
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Surely thats a joke. I could believe hydroelectric storage: pump water against gravity
That is a way to do it , though it's not very efficient ( but then again , otherwise it's wasted completely ).
Still , as someone pointed out , statistically , it's very likely that electric cars will charge at night , as most people will be working in the day , and will have to recharge there cars when they get home in the evening.
Also , as electricity is cheaper at night than in the day , most people would prefer charging there cars at night.
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My meter makes no differentiation between day and night, simply usage.
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:4, Insightful)
Still , as someone pointed out , statistically , it's very likely that electric cars will charge at night , as most people will be working in the day , and will have to recharge there cars when they get home in the evening.
Hmmmm. What about a company perk of being able to charge your vehicle at work? That would seem to be a great incentive to get people into EV's in the first place (ie make it a non-taxable perk to charge at work).
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:4, Funny)
With a long extension cord, it's already a perk.
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Surely thats a joke. I could believe hydroelectric storage: pump water against gravity, or selling the power to a neighboring network.
Nope, That is what the local natural gas power plant does.
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
To put that another way, a 100m rise with a reservoir that's 50m by 50m by 10m stores 5 MWh, enough to run 200,000 houses for an entire day.
Is this supposed to be problematic?
Want to see a TON of storage? Run the numbers on pumping a couple meters of water back and forth between Lake Superior and Lakes Michigan/Huron. ;)
Yes, Very Problematic (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this supposed to be problematic?.
Yes, very.
5MWh for 200,000 houses is 25 Watt-hours each, or a continuous load of about 1 Watt for a day. That would be about enough for one torch [flashlight] bulb. Are these hen-houses?
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually... I'll go ahead and do the math. Surface areas:
Superior: 82,400 km^3
Michigan-Huron: 59,600 + 58,000 km^3 = 117,600 km^3
So, if we want to cap off a maximum change of a mere 0.5 meter of height, and assuming that such a small amount has basically no affect on the surface area, that's 41.2 cubic kilometers. There's 4 meters height difference between the lakes; let's assume we average maintaining that difference. That would store about 350 GWh after losses -- more than the total generation of all hydroelectricity in the United States for an entire year.
But want an even crazier one? The Panama Canal is a (proportionally) thin canal that goes over the terrain via locks. But imagine if you had pipes connecting Atlantic to Pacific. It just so happens that the western and eastern coasts of Panama have opposite tides, and the magnitude of the tides is *far* greater on the Pacific tide -- averaging about 3 meters (the Atlantic side averages under half a meter). So you have basically limitless (oscillating) tidal power available.
IF you can harvest it.... ;)
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Interesting)
You have limitless tidal power available at any coast: simply dig a reservoir (a bay connected to the ocean through a small channel) and harvest the energy as water flows in and out. You also get a massive swimming pool/dozen kilometers of beachfront property out of the deal.
Digging those reservoirs would be a useful, unskilled, and labour-intensive project. We have a massive pool of people needing jobs. Hint, hint.
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Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a good point. I'm curious to know also if the battery production was taken into account when they decided electric vehicles would be better.
Surely from a pure power plant versus tailpipe emissions, the power plant won out. They scale better than auto gas engines do.
I'm still on the fence about lead. I'm glad it's gone from a lot of industrial and consumer products, but at the same time it did serve a valuable purpose. And when it comes to batteries, lead-acid batteries are dead simple to recycle. Lithium on the other hand isn't.
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Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure if you know why, but the European Union passed a Restriction on Hazardous Substances law which limits among other things lead in all products sold in the EU. Sadly. the market in the EU is so large that many manufacturers simply changed over all their production lines to use lead-free solder and other products.
What I've heard that with lead-free solder is that it will eventually grow hair like structures between wave soldered IC pins that are closely spaced and they aren't protected with conformal coatings. This causes malfunctions in equipment. Lead prevented that from happening but it was decided, for whatever reason, that being lead-free was better for the environment than the waste the changeover created.
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Insightful)
Removing lead is progress and in time the restriction will become a non-issue for even those that believe in the goodness of lead.
In the US, people spent ages bellyaching about the low-flush toilets. Initially the toilets that came out often did perform poorly because when you could use half a lake to flush the toilet you didn't need good design. Designs have improved and one of the greatest wasters of fresh water was reduced.
Realize that government is a process and that there are always trade-offs. Usually they aren't even entirely clear trade-offs.
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The other problem I see more of than whiskers post RoHS is cracked BGA joints. It is especially bad in equipment that is cycled often since the PCB and package have different thermal coefficients. The Pb allowed the solder to flex more, all the flow and corrosion issues have been fixed now as everyone learned the differences though.
It depends... (Score:3, Informative)
As usual, the answer is "it depends", with lots of assumptions you can argue about in the absence of actual data.
A biggie is where the grid electricity comes from.
Another is how long the batteries will last, and how long an electric car will last. There have been studies claiming that a Hummer has lower life cycle emissions than an electric car, but they assume an absurdly long lifetime for Hummer and an absurdly short lifetime (and no recycling) for the EV.
Google "life cycle emissions BEV" or something li
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
And the latest NG plants are now up to 60%, NOT counting that you can reuse the waste heat for industrial heating. 60% just for the electricity generation.
The grid is ~93% efficient, chargers ~92-93% efficient, li-ions 94% (inefficient rapid charging) to over 99% (efficient slow charging) in efficiency, and the drivetrain averages 85-90% efficiency in normal usage.
Non-hybrid gasoline ICEs average about 20% efficiency since the engine runs out of its optimal operating envelope most of the time and much energy is wasted through braking. Diesels average about 25% (their mileage numbers look even better, but part of that is due to the greater density of diesel fuel). Gasoline hybrids can get 30-35% efficiency (diesel hybrids even more, but the added weight and complexity is rarely considered justified by manufacturers).
Re:No problem, long as they charge at night (Score:4, Insightful)
If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.)
What I read in IEEE spectrum a few months ago was that it wasn't the production capacity that would be strained, but the transformers in residential areas. This surprised me, but the article stated that in many areas, the cooling capacity of the local transformers was undersized since they would be underutilized at night and would therefore cool off at that time.
That seems strange to me, since in the temperate climes, the hottest part of the year also has the shortest nights -- I wouldn't think the cooling benefit of lower usage at night would be so great, and it's not like your gonna swap out transformers on May Day and Halloween and ship them to the other hemisphere on an exchange program. I also don't think that this is a common practice in my part of the US because my Dad was a power EE, and he talked to me a lot about his job and never once mentioned this. They had a lot of transformer problems: squirrels grabbing two terminals, birds building nests (it's nice and warm), wrong oils used in filling them, PCB remediation, guys at the fiberglass plant busting the nearby insulators with glass beads shot from slingshots. But I sure don't remember anything about undersized radiator capacity. Hardly proof -- and maybe things changed since -- but it makes me skeptical.
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Re:What if... (Score:5, Interesting)
This study seemed to overlook something rather important.
Re:What if... (Score:5, Informative)
No, I think the study's numbers are on-base. Electric car adoption will not be 100% overnight (or we'd be pretty screwed). They are assuming 500K (out of 300M) cars with current power plant base loads... and that would be 0.0017, about 1/6 of one percent. I think our nighttime base load (which throws away energy right now) can handle it.
And that's assuming you are calculating actual energy converted from gasoline (a horrible conversion loss) and you are not conflating industrial/commercial transport with personal transport.
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You don't need that powerful electric motors to achieve same performance.
You don't need the performance at all. No really I mean it. How many people with SUV's have you seen leave the suburbs? My girlfriend's piss-weak 4cyl gets me from A to B just as well as my next door neighbours stupidly overpowered V8 Sedan. The mileage is better in the small car, the cost is cheaper, the maintenance is cheaper, there's no need for performance tyres etc, and even registering for our roads costs about half as much each year.
Yet my neighbour still has that V8.
What people need and what
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Dude, what is so difficult to understand in "you don't need that powerful electric motors to achieve same performance"?
Electric motors are far more efficient, they accelerate faster, and, most important, the V8 engine of your neighbour with lots of HP has got all this power only at its peak in a very narrow RPM band. Electric motors have got a linear rating. So an electric car with the engine rated the same as a car with an ICE engine will accelerate much faster than the ICE car. So much for that.
And if you
Re:What if... (Score:4, Interesting)
People won't pick a car with the same performance if a more powerful option is available, marketers know that and will will bolt high kW motors in given the option. Saying but you can achieve the same performance with a lower power engine appeals to greenies only. End result, high load on the grid.
Re:What if... (Score:4, Insightful)
People won't pick a car with the same performance if a more powerful option is available, marketers know that and will will bolt high kW motors in given the option. Saying but you can achieve the same performance with a lower power engine appeals to greenies only. End result, high load on the grid.
Ah, so nobody buys the V4 Accord, V4 Mustang, or any other car with a more powerful engine available?
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I suspect the Prius can accelerate fast enough, but the Prius driver is too occupied with playing the "how efficiently can I drive" game.
The Prius isn't a fast car but doesn't seem terribly slow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh_lKNAh4Sk&feature=related [youtube.com]
If that level of acceleration is still not enough to merge safely, then that section of the highway is badly (and unsafely) designed. I do not see it as a problem with the car.
If you do not design highways and stuff for "slower" drivers, then the next st
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We do, but keep in mind that an ICE is only about 18%to 19% efficient (the engine itself is about 20% http://courses.washington.edu/me341/oct22v2.htm [washington.edu], but not all of that gets to the pavement - 80%+ of the energy from burning gasoline ends up as heat or sound. Electric cars on the other hand are much more efficient - about 70% of what ends up in the battery goes to turning the wheels. http://ec.europa.eu/transport/urban/vehicles/road/electric_en.htm [europa.eu] .
Then you have delivery and fuel management. With gasol
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The biggest heat sources in an electric vehicle are the inverter and the motor. Li-ion pack efficiencies vary a lot depending on the particular chemistry choice and operating conditions. I've seen as low as 94% and well over 99% (some chemistries really are absurdly efficient). There's also some losses in the cabling.
Chargers are not "80-90%" efficient. They're usually 92-93% efficient.
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You were being funny, but I think it's important to point out: we produce about 14 exajoules of energy for electric power a year. We use about 28 exajoules for transportation.
This study seemed to overlook something rather important.
Although you have a strong point here, the energy we need for transportation would go down. We would use less if we used the much efficient electric cars. Gasoline/diesel cars produce loads of waste heat.
I know it's a joke, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Plus they could be set to charge at night (Score:2)
I mean for the most part you come home, you plug your car in. So, just have the car delay and charge off peak. Not a lot of usage at 3am normally and all the cars could be happily charging away.
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I mean for the most part you come home, you plug your car in. So, just have the car delay and charge off peak. Not a lot of usage at 3am normally and all the cars could be happily charging away.
Then 3am becomes a peak, and eventually there is NO peak and just a constant mid-high usage.
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A constant mid-high usage is basically the best case scenario for a power grid. This is especially true where nuclear power plants and other electricity producers can't actually be scaled back during low-load situations.
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Really? Is that how you use your car right now?
You don't go to lunch?
Go out for dinner?
Run to the corner store for groceries?
Any number of other errands or other trips?
And how many of these trips do you plan far enough in advance to also plan and schedule your car to be charged?
More likely: drive to work for 9 am, park, plugin car and charge [along with everybody else] just so you can get home in it
-oops, going out for lunch, need to charge car again
-drive home
-start charging car right away, because you m
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More likely the car wll be like your phone. Plug it in when convenient and don't think about it too much.
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"More likely: drive to work for 9 am, park, plugin car and charge [along with everybody else] just so you can get home in it"
You work more than 20mi from your home? Last I heard the min mileage for these things was about 40mi per charge. So if you work, say, 15mi from your home you have 10mi a day for running errands before you have to consider a mid-day charge. Other than that allowing people to program their cars to charge only when certain circumstances are met (say, 1-6am OR battery is at 30% charge) wo
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Come on. The Nissan Leaf has a 100 mile range. Lets call that about standard[indeed if the range were lower it would be instant fail], and likely to improve in the coming years. I would be surprised if most people drove more than 100 miles in a day. Certainly a 5 mile roundtrip errand/lunch wouldn't necessitate a recharge. Most people wouldn't even need to charge at work to get home in the evening. Indeed I would expect the facilities to facilitate this to be rare.
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Just like if most of the driving will be one person, but they will need to occasionally carry four, a two-seater is simply eliminated. People base their decision on reasonable maximums, not average use. It's not "hate against 'green tech'". It's just an absence of irrational infatuation with it.
Re:Plus they could be set to charge at night (Score:5, Informative)
Tesla range: 160-250 miles (depending on options)
Subaru G4e range*: 125 miles
Mini Electric: 100 miles
Chevy volt: 40 miles
Coda Sedan: 90 miles
Nissan Leaf: 100 miles
*vehicle has not hit production yet
Re:Plus they could be set to charge at night (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, with those sort of ranges, there's not much use for electric cars. I live in a city center so for about half my car use, those might be okay. However, the other half (pre time I use a car, not milage) when I can't just walk or take the public transit, I'm heading a minimum of 50 miles away and usually more like 100+. The only car that might be useful would be the Tesla with full options. The rest effectively aren't useful enough for me to deal without some sort of gas driven car. No hiking, camping, seeing friends and family in nearby cities. If I still lived in the suburb of a midwestern city, it was not uncommon to drive 100+ miles in one night. Drive into town and shop at a store, go to a friends, go to a night club, drive home. When I was in Houston, just getting in my car to go anywhere seemed like a two hour round trip on the highway. Since in the midwest, one has to drive to anything and it's usually a significant ways away, they really don't look useful for anything.
This raises the question, what does one do when your electric car runs out of juice? You can't really just pick up the battery and carry it to a station to recharge to get enough charge to get to that station with the car. Can a tow truck come charge you up enough to do so? Or do you have to get towed. Given the way my laptop batteries are with inaccurate readings or just cutting out when they get old, I really worry about electric cars.
Well.. being in that biz (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well.. being in that biz (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the major load on the charging systems would either be early morning when you just get to work and plug in, or early evening when you just get home and plug in. Not exactly prime time for brown outs..
My understanding, based on the time-of-use billing [ontario-hydro.com] coming soon to a power company near me, is that early evening when you just get home and plug in is exactly prime time for power shortages.
You could centrally control when recharging stations activate, but is somebody plugging in at 5:30 pm because they want to recharge it overnight, or because they want to pick up their kids from (band/soccer/whatever) practise at 9pm?
- RG>
So about those fires throughout Boston... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Well.. being in that biz (Score:4, Informative)
Your correct but the environmentalist want every car on the road to be either electric or hybrid, preferably electric. Hmm about 25,000,000 cars registered in CA give or take, so at a 2kwh charging load thats 2,000 & 25,000,000 = 50,000,000,000 or 50 gigawatt hours and that is more then the entire supply that the state of California has available and thats a combination of all available fuels we have on line.
Yeah! And my gasoline car burns about two gallons per hour of driving. Hmm about 25,000,000 cars registered in CA give or take, so 2 gallons per hour times 24 hours * 365.24 = 440 billion gallons of gasoline per year, three times what the whole US consumes!
(I.e., the problem with your calculation is that people's cars don't charge nonstop; they charge intermittently and in a staggered manner, whenever people or a smart grid tells them to. Never will they all be charging at the same time)
The next problem is that gigawatt hours are a measure of energy while 2 kilowatts (not kwh) is a unit of power.
That is the myth if the electric car, if we shift to all electric we simply shift the fuel consumption to another type of engine.
That's the "long tailpipe myth", and it's a myth. All peer-reviewed studies on the subject show that it's much better to switch to electric.
Now an electrical generating plant is more efficient then an internal combustion engine but you have to build out that capacity and keep a lot of it on hot stand-by because it takes a long time to spin up from cold to generating electricity
Wrong; utilities love EVs because the stabilize and even-out the load, meaning *less* need for peaking and spinning reserve.
Additionally no one is really talking about the insanely toxic batteries that will have to be disposed of on a regular basis.
You clearly have no clue what you're talking about. You can literally, legally throw discharged A123 batteries into municipal trash. The CEO of BYD likes to show off by *drinking* his batteries' electrolyte. As for "regular basis", we're talking ~80% capacity in 10 years.
Technology can move fast but we are pushing the limits of known technology as far as electrical storage is concerned
Not even *close*. I could list about a dozen cathode techs and two dozen anode techs, each of which could increase the density of their respective electrode ~50% to ~1000%. Will all of them make it to commercialization? Not a chance. Will *none* of them make it to commercialization? Likewise, not a chance. The rate of battery energy density increase has been a pretty steady 8% per year, but it's actually *increasing* of late.
There is a lot of progress being made in Electric double-layer capacitor "EDLC's" but even those are still experimental and cannot provide the kind of power you would need to run say a Tesla car
That's backwards. Capacitors have huge power density but poor energy density.
This sort of thing can only be good for wind/solar (Score:5, Interesting)
The more uses of electricity we have that can be done "whenever", the better the future looks for power sources like wind and solar. Hopefully power companies will start charging different rates for on-peak and off-peak residential usage (like they already do for major industrial users), and the market will take care of it.
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Yes. Millions of batteries connected to the power system is a good thing. In some way it's like building massive amounts of pumped storage.
No wind blowing at the moment? Then don't charge the 90% of cars which are on 'economy-charger' setting. Lots of wind blowing? Charge every car to full and use that wind!
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No wind blowing at the moment?
the total amount of wind blowing is pretty much constant. It varies a bit between places, but because the earth spins at a constant rate, and the sun puts in a constant amount of energy, the total amount of (wind mass)x(wind speed) is constant.
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Really? That's great news. Perhaps you should tell these people: www.hartlandwindfarm.com so that they don't have to build 500MW of thermal plant to backup their 2000MW wind farm.
I thought it was obvious that my statement was referring to the amount of energy produced from wind farms. This isn't the same as 'total amount of wind blowing in the world'. Perhaps I need to explain that in future.
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http://www.sustainabilitycentre.com.au/BaseloadFallacy.pdf [sustainabi...tre.com.au]
read the part about wind power as base-load.
Re:This sort of thing can only be good for wind/so (Score:5, Funny)
What a great idea. And they could market it under a clever name like "time-of-use" [google.com]or something equally catchy.
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Hopefully power companies will start charging different rates for on-peak and off-peak residential usage (like they already do for major industrial users), and the market will take care of it.
They already do in the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7 [wikipedia.org]
Re:This sort of thing can only be good for wind/so (Score:4, Insightful)
In future, it won't be enough to let a consumer make the decision on when to consume and encourage him with discounts in low peak hours. The model should be that for those loads where "time doesn't matter" we (the consumer) can indicate our constraints and then the electricity company will work within those boundaries. Of course, the more lenient the consumer is, the better rate he gets.
For this example, if I park my car at the office I don't care if the battery gets reloaded at 11 am of after lunch. As long as it's done before I drive home at 5 PM. Same for the return trip, the car could be rechared at 11PM or at 3AM, I don't care.
The crucial thing here is that fore heavier, but also time independent loads like this, your utility company gets control over when you are using electricity. We're still quite a bit away from that, but with smart grids, that's the way we're going.
And it will all benefit green power that produces electricity at "unexpected moments".
Re:This sort of thing can only be good for wind/so (Score:4, Interesting)
In future, it won't be enough to let a consumer make the decision on when to consume and encourage him with discounts in low peak hours. The model should be that for those loads where "time doesn't matter" we (the consumer) can indicate our constraints and then the electricity company will work within those boundaries. Of course, the more lenient the consumer is, the better rate he gets.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. As a time of day electricity user, my utility sends me a forecast of power costs for the next day broken up by hour, and I can plan my energy use accordingly. So, in the future, you'll be able to tell devices in your home above what cost threshold they shouldn't run (with the devices fetching the current and predicted cost of power via a web service). So you work around the energy company and their constraints based on the market price of power in your area.
Here is the graph from my provider:
https://il.thewattspot.com/login.do?method=showChart [thewattspot.com]
Your Provider Sucks at Estimating (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://www.google.com/search?q=time+of+day+metering [google.com]
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They'll still be worthwhile. Do some calcs. CFLs are an amazingly sensible investment compared to almost anything else.
From memory it's about an 18 fold return. Even if your 'off-peak' (btw evening isn't off-peak) power price is half the average price you're still looking at a 9:1 ROI.
2 kilowatts? (Score:3, Insightful)
I admit I didn't have time to read the study thoroughly, but:
(a) The study specifically talks about hybrid cars, not pure electrics; the headline is misleading.
(b) Let's take a very conservative estimate and say an electric car draws an average of 10hp when driving. That's about 7.5kw. Let's round that up to 8 for simplicity's sake, and if we assume 100% efficiency, the car needs to spend 4 minutes on the charger for every 1 minute it spends on the road. If we charge it overnight (8 hours), that's 2 hours of driving time, or 60 miles if you average (as many drivers do) somewhere around 30mph - before you have to plug it back in for another 8 hours. And that's in the absolutely best case.
I might be missing something, but 2kw to charge sounds very unrealistic to me.
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Especially since CHAdeMO chargers [wikipedia.org] can provide up to 62.5kW...
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The total energy used to charge the vehicles is important but the rate they charge at is not. If the cars charge fast then the load will still be spread through the off peak period because cars charging early will push the off peak period later into the night.
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If you're assuming 100% efficiency and constant power (probably quite wrong on both counts), just have a look at the capacity of battery packs and divide by the charging time. We can look at 3 battery packs: the Prius (1.3 kWh), the Chevy Volt (16 kWh), and the Tesla Roadster (53 kWh). For an 8 hour charge time, that's approximately 160 W (Prius), 2.0 kW (Volt), and 6.6 kW (Roadster).
Sure.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And I expect there was a rather large switch from incandescent to compact fluorescent globes around the same time - which may have given greater savings than losses from those plasmas....
But what on earth kind of argument is that? Electric cars wont be a problem coz plasma TVs weren't.... How absurd.
Re:Sure.. (Score:4, Insightful)
But what on earth kind of argument is that? Electric cars wont be a problem coz plasma TVs weren't.... How absurd.
Yep. If everybody suddenly went out and bought a plasma TV for every room then plasma TVs would be a problem.
How Many Plasma TVs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably because households buying plasma televisions purchase one, maybe two, and they are replacing cathode tube (with shadow mask) televisions which have been consuming electric load since the 1950s. And those plasma TVs are not operating for too many hours (hopefully), never mind that LCD televisions are far more popular. It's not surprising that many people are at least more concerned when typical two-car households each might add the equivalent of 8 to 10 plasma televisions of net new electricity consumption to the grid. Thankfully that consumption should be off-peak, especially if timed chargers and peak electricity pricing are mandated, but the plasma TV analogy breaks down very quickly.
also you need add the cable / sat box draw running (Score:2)
also you need add the cable / sat box draw running 24/7 back in the days where cathode tube ones where all over the place you did not need the cable box that much.
With today's cable box leavening them off most of the day is not a good idea.
Plasma is almost dead, FUD continues (Score:2)
Plasma TVs doesn't take too much power, at least the new models. They always analyze the light conditions surrounding them and set brightness based on that. They also come with that setting as default.
I won't repeat manufacturer claims as we all know they are a bit too ideal. Lets say, I connected it to a 800VA APC UPS (which, I suggest to all equipment owners) and I noticed it can feed for 15 mins along with a H264/HDTV DVR box.
Just wait couple of months until all vendors setup their LED TV etc. contracts,
Color me skeptical... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think there are roughly 2 houses on my block (of about 20 homes) that have a single plasma TV. They do, however, have at least a single car. Many of them have 2 or more. That translates as a lot of "plasma TVs" on that block.
Also, we need to realize that they are limiting their expectations:
Basically they are saying "Electric cars wont bring down the grid -- if they aren't widely adopted". What if, instead of half a million, there's 10-30 million? How many "plasma TVs" does it take to bring down the grid? Add to this that our current administration wants to increase the cost of our energy -- so not only will gas be more expensive, but so will electricity. What's the incentive?
DoE says nearly 200 million, not half (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing the electric car threatens is 160 billion dollars of income every year for the 2 billion barrels of oil we wouldn't have to import for finished motor fuel, if 2/3 of the country switched to electric. There's also the terror of reliable electric drive trains, fewer moving parts, and the closure of tens of thousands of gas stations.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/doe_study_offpe.html [greencarcongress.com]
Current batteries for PHEVs could store the energy for driving the national average commute—about 3
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What's the incentive?
The incentive is you pay for electricity to fuel your vehicle, which should be much cheaper than what gasoline/diesel in the US actually costs without subsidies ($8-12/gallon).
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In that case, they will just convert the electric consumption to something that has a better scale, like "Libraries of Congress".
What's the incentive?
There is none. Around here, they say "conserve!", but if you do, then they say "we don't have the revenue we used to! Raise the rates!". Heaven forbid a union pu
4 or 5 plasma televisions? Stupid comparison. (Score:2)
Yes, but there are two issues with this. Firstly, most of the plasma televisions purchased replaced older CRTs. In cases where there wasn't a significant difference in screen size between the plasma TV and the CRT it replaced, overall draw would fall.
Secondly, I really don't see the average family owning 4 or 5 50" plasma televisions
Is this future tense? (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't need to worry about electric cars overloading power grids, we're already doing it right now.
You can't possibly say that the rolling blackouts and brownouts of the California power grid are "normal operating procedures" for a power system working within it's capacity, let alone a sign they have any surplus room for recharging electric vehicles.
Re:Is this future tense? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout [wikipedia.org]
Though the term did not enter popular use in the U.S. until the California electricity crisis of the early 2000s, outages had indeed occurred previously. The outages were almost always triggered by unusually hot temperatures during the summer, which causes a surge in demand due to heavy use of air conditioning. However, in 2004, taped conversations of Enron traders became public showing that traders were purposely manipulating the supply of electricity, in order to raise energy prices.
The DoE has stated that most of the Eastern Seaboard could support the energy requirements of every single car used for commuting today, without any changes to transmission or power production, as long as the cars are charged at night.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/doe_study_offpe.html [greencarcongress.com]
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Well obviously that works out, then (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like most working people, the first thing I always do when I get home is turn on my 4 or 5 plasma TVs. Since that wasn't a problem, I'm sure the electric car I buy won't be a problem either!
It may very well not be a problem, but that statement is goddamn stupid. Most of us aren't drawing that much power regularly when you get home.
Yeah, uhuh, that's logic (Score:3, Funny)
TV's weren't a problem. So 5 times as many won't either.
Why are people so short-sighted. If you're running out of power now, needing way more won't help.
That said, as I said before, capitalist societies solve enormous problems quickly, and don't big problems at all.
If Obama wants to do something easy.... (Score:2)
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Vehicle to Grid (Score:3, Informative)
Better comparison please (Score:5, Funny)
The load of one plug-in recharging (about 2 kilowatts) is roughly the same as that of four or five plasma television sets.
Sorry, I don't understand this idea of power rated by plasma TVs. Could you please give that in terms of the number of slow cookers required to have the same draw as one EV charge?
Misleading figures (Score:2, Interesting)
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I did some analysis on this... (Score:3, Informative)
...and the situation seemed more worrisome than this article suggests. I assumed that, eventually, people will shift to all-electric vehicles as opposed to hybrids. Below are the numbers I used. Did I flub the math? Because these calculations sure seem to suggest an electricity crunch as we move off petroleum:
Total miles driven in the U.S. yearly: 3x10^12 mi
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/05/us-vehicle-mile.html
Electricity use per mile for a fully electric car: 0.17 to 0.37 kWh/mi (mean: 0.27)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Energy_efficiency
Total electricity needed to support all miles driven by fully-electric vehicles: 3x10^12 mi * 0.27 kWh/mi = 8.1x10^11 kWh
Total yearly electricity production of the U.S. (2007): 4.157x10^9 kWh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States#Electricity_generation
In other words, if we assume that hybrid/electric vehicles currently account for an insignificant portion of total miles driven, and we were to covert all vehicles to be fully electric, U.S. electricity production would have to increase by a factor of 194 in order to support the additional load.
Patent encumbrance of automotive NiMH batteries (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And then the fact that you have to replace a major and expensive component of your vehicle (batteries) every 3-5 years.
Where are you pulling that figure from?
I doubt the battery lifespan is going to be that short when the Chevy Volt (for example) is coming with a 150,000 miles/10 year warranty, and Nissan seems likely to follow suite with the Leaf.