Why EVs Won't Crash the Electric Grid (msn.com) 418
"If everyone has an electric car, will the electric grid be able to support all those cars being recharged?"
That's the question being answered this week in the Washington Post's "Climate Coach" newsletter: We can already see a preview of our electric future in Norway, one of the countries with the highest share of EVs. More than 90 percent of new cars sold in the country were plug-in electric, according to the latest data, from May. More than 20 percent of the country's overall vehicle fleet is electric, a share expected to rise to one-third by 2025. So far, the grid has essentially shrugged it off. "We haven't seen any issue of the grid collapsing," says Anne Nysæther, a managing director at Elvia, a utility serving Oslo and the surrounding areas with the nation's largest concentration of EVs. The country, now almost entirely powered by renewables, has easily met the extra demand from EVs while slashing greenhouse gas emissions. That's good, because Norway will ban all new petrol and diesel cars by 2025...
To electrify everything — all these expected EVs, heat pumps and other big power draws — [the U.S.] will need to start building up our grid, according to Jesse Jenkins, an energy modeling and engineering expert at Princeton University. The United States must at least double its electricity supply by 2050, while stringing up 75,000 miles of new high-voltage lines by 2035, the equivalent of 15 round trips from Los Angeles to New York City, and connect new wind and solar generation to the grid. That sounds like a lot. But something like this has already been done. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the U.S. built new transmission capacity at a speed close to what is required today, writes Jenkins in Mother Jones, even as electricity demand grew.
That's the question being answered this week in the Washington Post's "Climate Coach" newsletter: We can already see a preview of our electric future in Norway, one of the countries with the highest share of EVs. More than 90 percent of new cars sold in the country were plug-in electric, according to the latest data, from May. More than 20 percent of the country's overall vehicle fleet is electric, a share expected to rise to one-third by 2025. So far, the grid has essentially shrugged it off. "We haven't seen any issue of the grid collapsing," says Anne Nysæther, a managing director at Elvia, a utility serving Oslo and the surrounding areas with the nation's largest concentration of EVs. The country, now almost entirely powered by renewables, has easily met the extra demand from EVs while slashing greenhouse gas emissions. That's good, because Norway will ban all new petrol and diesel cars by 2025...
To electrify everything — all these expected EVs, heat pumps and other big power draws — [the U.S.] will need to start building up our grid, according to Jesse Jenkins, an energy modeling and engineering expert at Princeton University. The United States must at least double its electricity supply by 2050, while stringing up 75,000 miles of new high-voltage lines by 2035, the equivalent of 15 round trips from Los Angeles to New York City, and connect new wind and solar generation to the grid. That sounds like a lot. But something like this has already been done. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the U.S. built new transmission capacity at a speed close to what is required today, writes Jenkins in Mother Jones, even as electricity demand grew.
Before the buildout (Score:4)
The US needs to get its house in order with how it manages the existing systems. 'Member the 2003 NorthEast blackout? Profit over safety and reliability... ultimately costing lives and $6 billion.
But it's been 20 years, who knows... maybe profit-over-all has been replaced by responsible management already. I mean, I'd bet a lot of money it HASN'T, but it's possible.
Re:Before the buildout (Score:5, Informative)
'Member the 2003 NorthEast blackout? Profit over safety and reliability... ultimately costing lives and $6 billion.
Funny how you jumped to that decades old example, completely skipping over the Great Texas Freeze of 2021 where hundreds of people [texastribune.org] literally froze to death in their homes because of profit. That profit being Greg Abbott ordering Ercot to charge customers high prices for several days resulting in a $16 billion overcharge [businessinsider.com]. All because Ercot couldn't be bothered to upgrade its electrical systems because that would cut into its profits.
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There's already signs that say "last gas for... XX miles" in the USA.
How will this be different?
Re:Before the buildout (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Before the buildout (Score:3)
I don't think it's fair to call those police "good guys". They were absolutely unwilling to be good guys when the situation demanded it.
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What happens if there's a gas shortage and a whole bunch of cars need to refuel there?
https://i.insider.com/4e5e9a54... [insider.com]
Re: Before the buildout (Score:2)
Re:Before the buildout (Score:4, Insightful)
Norway is not a small country and has the same population patterns as the US, small (relative to the size of the country) areas of high population density while most of the rest of it is extremely low population density. It eve has extreme weather like our Midwest!
Norway is in fact a pretty damn good model to show that we can do this in the US.
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There are a lot of lonely highways here, especially in the winter. Some highways done even support all year gas stations. I just cannot foresee anyone wanting to spend money to run electricity to the highway and put a charger every couple hundred kilometers. It's going to end up like cellphone reception, wher
Re:Before the buildout (Score:5, Interesting)
it was not capitalism that pulled the humanity from poverty, it was trade and small but steady technological evolution, that can happen in any regime.
Don't confuse political issues with market and technological changes, there are plenty of capitalist countries that are poor and several socialism friendly countries that are rich, being the north Europe countries one of the biggest examples of that. They having huge taxes and the state impose many rules and control, yet everything works and the state helps anyone in need.
>Socialism is totalitarian system
soviet socialism was a totalitarian system, but socialism itself is an idea, the way how you implement it is open to any government regime
Soviet socialism was broken, true, but USA capitalism is not, right now, in good health too, the race for max profit is killing many companies and causing many social problems...and it brings no profit to try to solve those problems and will in the end spark revolts
It is usually in the middle ground were people are happier and have less social problems, not super rich, but also not as many poor people. But also as always, there is no "one size fits all", all countries and cultures have different demands and way of thinking, that may favor different ideas and solutions.
Being a kingdom, republic, democracy, tyranny, etc, it just change who is in command and how he/she gets there, and if they are good, it will work, if they are bad, everything will fall apart.
The difference in the end is that king and tyranny, you can't change the leadership easily if they are bad and that long governments tend to overlook some kind of problems , as they get more distant from the normal people problems, that in the long run can also spark revolts
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Re:Before the buildout (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes but no socialist countries became rich by practicing socialism. The became rich via capitalism and then the government seized the means of production from the proletariat. Which works fine as long as the government is stable and functional.
That's just ignorance talking. Precisely the countries mentioned became rich by practicing socialism, not capitalism. Norway is often held as a prime example of a country that is only propped up by the fact that the government makes money off the oil industry. But that isn't capitalism. The government *IS* the oil industry. Specifically the largest oil extractor Equinor has it's history as Statoil (translation: State oil), literally a company started and run by the government, and still a government entity to this day. They contributed the most to Norway's wealth and they are one of the few examples of socialism in its most pure form: a government controlling the means of production. No one seized anything. And that is very much true for many "socialist" enterprises outside the USSR.
Now I put "socialism" in quotes precisely for the same reason I now put "capitalism" in quotes. The reality is the USA doesn't practice capitalism either. Capitalism is a construct free from government intervention. That doesn't exist anywhere in the world. Likewise socialism is a construct free from private ownership, that doesn't exist anywhere in the world either. Every nation practices some form of sliding scale between different social systems and no one (not even the USSR) has implemented any in their purest form, because in their purest form economic theory dictates that each of them has only one stable state: 100% of power concentrated in the hands of a single entity, be that the state, or Amazon.
Re:Before the buildout (Score:4, Interesting)
Didn't the USSR go from a country where most people were peasants to space fairing in about 50 years, which included a horrible war and a horrible dictator?
Since going capitalist, I don't know if the average Russian is much better off then the average Soviet citizen. Judging from the birth rate, death rate from alcohol abuse and still lacking basic freedoms like being able to speak out about their government.
China is another example, they seem to have broken the cycle of extreme famines that killed millions for centuries with the average Chinese citizen better off, though still with the same lack of freedoms and too big bureaucracy.
As for the west, I think the freedoms and rule of law, combined with capitalism has been one of the main things that made us wealthy. Unluckily that is being actively undone, by the rich capitalists, leading to lawlessness, removal of peoples freedoms, in the name of freedom of all things and an increasing number of poor people who have problems with the basics like housing and good food.
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Actually, it was capitalism that pulled humanity out of poverty. The industrial revolution coincides with the development of capitalism in Europe and North America. Industrial revolution, especially industrialization of the agriculture, is the single factor that pulled the humanity out of poverty.
As for socialism, you are correct, it's only an idea. To be precise, it's a totalitarian idea because it's based on limiting or abolishing the property rights. So called "democratic socialism" is a fantasy. The pro
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"Yet, the value of diamond is much larger than the value of water"
Which is a clear example of human greed & stupidity.
Water is far more useful & necessary than diamonds and the marketing campaign that sold the world on the supposed "value" of them was exposed at least 40 years ago
"Have You Ever Tried To Sell a Diamond"
Re:Before the buildout (Score:4, Informative)
Anchor href didn't work so here is a bare link
"Have You Ever Tried To Sell a Diamond" - Atlantic Magazine Feb 1982
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma... [theatlantic.com]
Re:Before the buildout (Score:5, Insightful)
The original cause was a bug, the cascade effect was overall piss poor planning because it would have taken effort (read: money).
American 'capitalism' is a game of Monopoly and most people are losing but happy to keep playing because they think they have a shot at being the ultimate winner.
Socialism is not the same as communism, and not slobbering over capitalism's knob is not socialism anyway. There's nothing wrong with making sure important things are heavily regulated, and that common infrastructure is government-controlled so it isn't vulnerable to being weakened by short-term profit motive.
There's also nothing wrong with a social safety net. 'Member the plot of Breaking Bad? That could never happen in Canada.
Norway is very, very different... (Score:5, Informative)
It's important to note just what exactly powers Norway that gives it such a large amount of power from renewables - to see how reproducible that is the the U.S.
In 2021, Norway was powered 91.5% by Hydro power. [statista.com]
It's important to note that unlike wind or solar, hydro power is constant.
What does that mean for the U.S.? If you want to end up with the grid shrugging off EV's, better start building out lots more nuclear supply for constant load support - because lots and lots of people are going to be charging cars overnight, where solar doesn't help and wind may not provide much for weeks at a time.
Re:Norway is very, very different... (Score:5, Informative)
Their grid may be mostly renewables and is slashing greenhouse emissions, but it's funded by selling oil and other people burning it.
Re:Norway is very, very different... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, fine for Norway... how about Sweden or Denmark? ohh, they are "rich" too? and how about Spain and Portugal? they aren't rich, yet they modernized their electrical grid! It was funded by taxes on electrical prices. electricity is not cheap there, but never was, as they were dependent of external energy (coal and oil), but now they are less dependent and while the rest of Europe had huge prices increase due to the Ukraine way, both Portugal and Spain manage to keep their electrical prices from skyrocket. Their cost per kWh have been dropping from 20 years already, only increasing due to the war... but again, increasing less than the rest of the Europe, where also most of the countries had a more or less stable kWh price in the last 20 years
go check https://app.electricitymaps.co... [electricitymaps.com]
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So they have a country with strong social programs supported by capitalism? Why can't we do that in the USA?
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It's important to note just what exactly powers Norway that gives it such a large amount of power from renewables
Strawman.
The USA has large deserts for solar farms and plenty of wind.
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The USA has large deserts for solar farms and plenty of wind.
Heck, if we set up a bunch of windmills around Washington DC, and perhaps get more in place in the states that hold early presidential caucuses (e.g. Iowa)... we might even be able to export power to Canada and Mexico!
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well, sun is actually more or less constant, but the idea is always the same, a diverse and spread energy source, with storage (not only batteries, but mostly hydro storage or hydrogen). And also do not forget about redundancy, so even if there is no sun, wind, well, you still have nuclear, gas, hydro and geothermal... using those for 50% of the time is still MUCH better than running those 100% of the time!!
what you need is a good electrical grid, several European countries upgraded their grid decades ago (
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EVs are ideal for demand shaping. We already have chargers that wait for local solar or cheap grid energy before turning on.
You don't need constant power, in fact quite the opposite because if you don't do demand shaping you will get huge spikes when everyone comes home from work at 5PM.
Nuclear won't help because it can't quickly ramp up or down to meet demand. If you are demand shaping anyway, all you need to do is ensure you have enough energy over 24 hours for everyone's daily commute, and there are much
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We have this in Europe and the charger will ensure that the car has enough range in the morning. We can predict demand and availability in the short term very well so it's easy to announce pricing in advance, and the charger can then select the cheapest times that will reach the required charge level.
California... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:California... (Score:5, Insightful)
Economies of Scale (Score:4, Informative)
Since California has roughly the same GDP per capita as Norway there is no reason why California could not have a power grid at least as robust, if not better than Norway's due to the benefits of density and economies of scale. The difference may be that Norway has long dark winters that need light and heating so reliable electrical power is a must.
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Indeed, it should be much easier to build a strong, robust grid in California
Nope. Norway gets its electricity mainly from hydro (~91.5% in 2021). Hydro provides baseload, or if you prefer, it doesn't rely as much as solar/wind on external conditions (sun for solar, wind for. turbines). You can have that much hydropower only under very specific conditions (geographical ones mainly).
What is the 2nd best baseload-capable low-carbon power source? I guess that's nuclear. And unlike the renewables fanatics (like amimojo, gweihir, and a few vocals others) who want to only build renewables
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Regardless of which electricity generation method is used, there will be a shift in spending away from gasoline and on to electricity distribution and generation. This shift will happen over a long period of time, and should allow the grid to gradually improve.
Nuclear is much harder to build incrementally than renewables. I started out with a solar PV 6.5 kW system in 2010, increased the capacity to 9.4 kWh in 2012, and now in 2023 I'm at 20.6 kW. All the original 28 panels are still there. But now there is
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The problem with a nuclear heavy grid is that it can't react very well to demand. Hydro can, and some other renewables can.
When everyone gets home from work and plugs in, you see a massive spike in demand. You will have to have fossil fuel plants on standby to meet it.
Or you can shape demand with pricing. Europe does it quite successfully with EV charging. It also helps keep the price of electricity less volatile, which businesses love.
So why not demand shape with nuclear? Well you can, but why would you pa
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Power line is far from the only cost driver, though. Take Norway's being ~90% hydro. If Norway had California's population per square mile, it couldn't do that, the terrain suitable for hydro just doesn't exist enough in proportion. Plus the extra people would be demanding water to drink and use for crops and all that, making the situation even worse.
Same sort of deal with solar and wind, really - if you don't need much power, you can place all your wind farms in the 1% best areas. Same with solar, real
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A roof tilted north is still useful for solar, just not not as useful as one tilted south. You can use PVWatts to calculate the difference.
I have a 9.4kW system (3 arrays) on roofs pointed southeast. And an 11.2kW array (2 arrays) on roofs pointed northwest.
Each system generates approximately the same amount of energy on any given day. Some days, the southeast produces more, others the northwest.
For the period 10/9 through 6/16, the southeast panels generated 7,982 kWh.
The northwest system produced 7,517 kW
Re: Economies of Scale (Score:2)
This is one of those scenarios where population density makes the work harder, unfortunately. One of the major challenges integrated resource planning groups at utilities face right now is that you aren't just "beefing up" the grid, you're entirely reconfiguring it's basic assumptions with EVs and renewables.
Take for example trucking. Using reasonable back of the envelope assumptions for how much energy a typical logistics operation of moderate size would draw when electrified, it takes their needs from wha
Re:California... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously. Norway has 5.4M people, with 38 people per square mile. California has a population of 39.3M, with 281 people per square mile. These aren't even remotely the same situations.
Higher population density makes the economics of building a power grid much better.
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Better only in some ways. After a point, getting the land to run power lines to feed electricity to more people in more locations becomes more difficult and expensive, people start complaining about the pollution from traditional style hydrocarbon power plants, you've dammed up all the good hydropower spots, etc... And still need more power.
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Seriously, people are looking at this like you should calculate demand based on the average. But there's already case history on how to sort this out, from the telecommunications industry.
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By going all techie you are obfuscating the reason for this effort. Is this a deliberate ploy to make is seem to hard and imply that fossil fuels are the only realistic answer?
Put another way, are you a shill for the fossil energy lobby?
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For me that means I personally choose a plug in hybrid versus all electric until
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People seem to be under the impression that every electric car owner is recharging from zero to 100% every night.
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Norway didn't benefit from the likes of Enron deregulating its grid just after the turn of the century. You should be happy that they skimmed around $30 billion from your market that might otherwise have been wasted on system maintenance and upgrades.
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Is that the cheap nuclear power I keep hearing so much about? Because I pay about $0.30 for electricity from renewables and a rock-solid grid here in Europe.
Well, France nearly collapsed in the Winter so the last German nukes had to stay up a bit longer (no other reason), but apart from that the last outage I remember was > 15 years ago and that was local and a mere minute long after a transformer failed and they needed to switch over to the redundant one.
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I'm paying about $0.10/kwh here in southwest PA.
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But are Norwegians shutting perfectly good nuclear reactors down, only to purchase power from coal plants instead?
California has a very "interesting" way of doing the transition to green energy. They don't seem to care about emissions, nor providing power to constituents when needed, but carry a plan that makes little sense.
They had to ask people to "voluntarily" cut power (i.e.: live like 1960s) to avoid blackouts: https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]. Because the other year, we had actual blackouts even when
Doesn't make sense (Score:2, Insightful)
A billion new EVs plugged into the grid won't harm it, but a few dozen BTC farms would bring us to total ecological and industrial collapse? I was told that we were on the brink.
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Most Charging at Night (Score:5, Informative)
People that aren't as familiar with EVs might not realize it, but most people charge their cars overnight at home. They don't use fast chargers on the highway, they use level 2 chargers at home.
The good thing about that is that's when power consumption in general is lowest so we have a whole bunch of excess capacity.
The bad thing is that cars/charging stations have to be configured to charge at that time and not when the driver gets home at 6PM when power consumption is the greatest.
It's a quick and easy process, but it's something that will need to be made easier if we want to keep the grid stable
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Even more, as we move more into renewables that have variable output, EVs really need to adjust their charging dynamically, charging not just at night, but whenever there is excess capacity. In a solar-heavy grid, that will actually be early in the day, when there's plenty of sun but the full heat is still building. In a wind-heavy grid, it can be any time of day or night, though many regions (especially coastal regions) have daily patterns.
This isn't a huge problem, and in fact the ability of EVs to act
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There is already smartgrid for EV charging with many utilities. For the past 6 years, I have had two Enel Juiceboxes and earn credits for the privilege of letting PG&E choose what exact time to charge my EV - within the time period of my choice, which is during off-peak hours. It works very well. We both always have fully charged cars in the morning. And we get $80/year in credits that we wouldn't otherwise when using non-smart chargers.
Too bad our vehicles (Chevy Bolt and Volt) do not support V2G, only
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It costs us nothing, really, since we only need the car to be fully charged the next day, never in the middle of the night when we sleep.
It's essentially free money, so yes, I believe it's actually a good deal. It's money I would rather have than not.
The first 5 years, PG&E would delay the charging of our cars until about 2am. In the last year, they have been charging right away at the start of the off-peak time period. So, it's been literally no compromise at all.
We still get credits even if the chargi
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It costs us nothing, really, since we only need the car to be fully charged the next day, never in the middle of the night when we sleep.
Because unforeseen things like emergencies or disasters never happen in the middle of the night.
Personally, I need a vehicle that can go anywhere, anytime. So one that I can fully charge (with gasoline) on any day at any time of day any where as much as a I want...is the minimal acceptable guaranteed reliability metric. (Because although the any-any is normal, it doesn't work in disasters. Which I mitigate by having all my tanks filled up every day.)
I live in a dense major city (Washington, D.C.) are and co
Re: Most Charging at Night (Score:2)
To each their own. But I don't need a fully charged vehicle at all times. One is a PHEV and just needs to be able to reach the nearest gas station for a fast "charge" in an emergency. That is about 3 miles away. The other is an EV with a range of several hundred miles. In an emergency, we might only take one car. I feel very comfortable with the vehicles not charging ASAP. I would not want to charge during peak hours.
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Re:Most Charging at Night - Excess Capacity? (Score:2)
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This is like saying... (Score:2)
"My gaming rig will run the next installment of GTA just fine, provided I upgrade my GPU before the game is released."
Totally ignores that upgrades cost money, and if the upgrade isn't done, the game is probably going to run like crap on the barely adequate GPU I'm presently using. I suspect it's the same with a national power grid, too.
Here in Florida, the power company will actually pay you so they can turn off your air conditioner during the hottest, most miserable parts of the day. So much for having
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BEVs will charge at night, but what happens when everyone gets home from rush hour at the same time, plugs in their car, and starts cooking dinner on their electric stove?
They should just configure their cars not to charge until around bedtime. BEVs are actually great for the grid because they're a load that's almost arbitrarily time-shiftable, and because they funnel money to the grid that is currently going to gas stations and petroleum companies. The grids get more money, but without much increase in peak demand (which is far more expensive than total demand).
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It's not really a lot of capacity. Running all 5 burners of my induction cooktop for a full hour uses 7.4 kWh.
Have I ever used all 5 at once for one full hour ? Not that I recall since I installed that cooktop. Induction is very efficient and very fast. One of my favorite recipes for rice takes 2 minutes of preheating (boiling the water) and 5 minutes of cooking in an induction-compatible pressure cooker. This is basmati rice, not instant. And not on the most powerful burner. It's fairly rare that any recip
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That gas gets far, far more utility making electricity in a turbine than just getting burned directly to make hot.
Seriously gas stoves are very inefficient in terms of heat generated making it into your food.
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Here in Cali, PG&E pays me in Juicepoints for the privilege of letting them decide what time of the night to charge our two EVs. This is worth about $80/year.
The cooktop issue is a separate one. Unfortunately, you can't do smartgrid things with cooktops, the way you can with EV charging or A/C use.
But the grid already accommodates a large number of electric and induction cooktops; far more than the number of EVs, certainly.
Google tells me : "according to the latest AHS estimates, there are a little over
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why haven't florida people installed yet solar panels, to use solar to power their air conditioner?
add some batteries or spinwheel and you can then transfer some of that power to the car when you arrive home
but anyway, you will probably see that if that is a problem, the governments, electrical companies and car builds will add control in to the cars, that they will stop charging in high demand hours (may be override, at a extra cost probably), being that flag controlled by the electrical companies.
it will
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What happens if everybody comes home at 6pm, plugs in their BEV and starts cooking? Well, if everybody got a BEV tomorrow (good luck since they all have waiting lists), I guess it would be a complete calamity. Everybody already comes home at 6pm and cooks.
Hopefully as BEV usage rises, the electric company will do something similar to the AC credits and help everybody set their BEV to charge non-peak hou
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Everybody already comes home at 6pm and cooks.
Hopefully as BEV usage rises, the electric company will do something similar to the AC credits and help everybody set their BEV to charge non-peak hours.
There are not enough (peak or off-peak) hours in the day to do this.
By the way, people also turn up their AC or Heat when the come home, not just their stoves and microwaves.
And you know what else people do? Use their cars to go places after work, and after they get home, and even later into the evening (groceries, pick up the kids, going out, ...)
What fantasy world do people live in where the car is only used for commuting, and on a fixed schedule? And where the number of overnight hours is infinite?
It's a
Why EVs Won't Crash the Electric Grid (Score:2)
Because engineers are not totally fucking stupid.
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I live in a 50s house and it's really no big deal. (Score:5, Informative)
I live in the neighbor country and just got an full EV recently.
I was surprised just how little it takes to charge it, I didn't even buy a fast charger or a wall charger, I just use the 2.8KWh charger that was included and it works fine. In fact, my car is fully charged every day after work, and I drive roughly 70-100KM each day to work, and there's half the battery "tank" left when I come home.
And for the facts, my electricity bill was 50$ more each month (and this is when electricity now is super expensive), so it's not the end of the world. If I had used my older (but not that old, only 5 years old, relatively modern combustion engine based) car - it'd cost me 300$ a month with the same driving.
Everyone (including me earlier) thinks that an EV slow-charged at home will burn down the house or require special installations, not so - In fact, I used the same amount of electricity with my computer, fridge,television etc. during one month and that cost more so, the EV didn't even make a dent in my electricity usage.
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Keep shouting it from the rooftops...
Dangerous (Score:2)
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We still have a growing population. It's very hard to reduce the demand for energy. It's much easier to decrease the role of fossil fuels in the power grid, ie. adding renewables to meet all extra demand, and reducing the use of natural gas, oil, and coal (what little usage still remains of it, certainly not much here in California).
EVs are a big part of reducing emissions from burning fossil fuels - oil, diesel.
Of course, you need power to charge them. But that power can be much cleaner than oil. Even if t
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Are you saying it's a false statement ?
My area has zero public transit. Walkscore of 4, transit 0, bike score 1 - all out of 100. Having automobiles is simply a life necessity here. We choose to drive EVs.
The California grid is 33.6% renewables, so far. There is 0% oil and 3% coal.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation
There is not much we could do but drive cars other than move. And even if we did, the next home buyer would be
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The reality is that to meet our climate goals we need to REDUCE our demand for power in all forms. The idea that we can simply replace our power sources and go on as before is pollyanish. It is largely driven by a political debate dominated by an elite that both wants to protect its own interests and lifestyle and doesn't trust the rest of us to make adult decisions.
The energy demand is from the proletariat masses, and it necesarily always increases. I see your idea is that there should be an "elite" group of "adults" who will dictate to us what we "need". What do you envision your rank will be in the Party, Comrade?
Yes? No? (Score:2)
TFS says Norway is just fine. No problems. But then the US will have to upgrade our system. If we are to take the example of Norway to heart (Why else did it lead the story?), then we should be just fine sitting here with our thumbs up our butts.
Devil is in the details (Score:5, Insightful)
Scandinavian peninsula has a very unique geographic pattern, where it's salty Atlantic Ocean on one side, mountain range near the ocean granting a significant and stable rain pattern over the mountains, and it goes slowly down into flatlands and finally Gulf of Bothnia and Baltic Sea.
This ensures that Norway (and to a lesser extent Sweden) has the following in massive excess compared to anywhere else in the world:
1. Dammable rivers with large height differentials over short distances.
2. Natural reservoirs on those rivers that can be used to store water for later - effectively a cheap natural gravity battery with massive total capacity.
3. Highly profitable grid interconnects going from southern Norway to Denmark (read below to understand why).
This leads to Norway being able to do pretty much any stupid shit it wants with electricity except for one thing. It cannot harm its relationship with Swedish grid operator. Because one problem with that geography is that Norway has no meaningful way to move electricity over long ranges in North-South direction within its borders, only East-West. So what they do is they have two national grids that aren't actually meaningfully connected to one another. What they do is connect to Swedish flatlands in the East near Gulf of Bothia/Baltic Sea, and then move electricity within Swedish grid in North-South direction.
This is why when Norway did some really amazingly stupid shit with their dam management last year due to them guaranteeing Danish electric grid stability, electricity prices in Oslo were some of the most expensive in Europe with something like 500 EUR per megawatt/hour spot prices while in Kirkenes, they were paying something like 20 EUR per megawatt/hour. When they realised they fucked up, they promptly adjusted their water management strategy with higher backup storage for their own grid security, so this is unlikely to repeat into the next year.
Basically, their grid is almost entirely idiot proof. They have so much overbuilt hydro with natural (and partially artificial) reservoirs that their base power is almost 100% flexible and can start and stop rapidly and can store massive amounts of energy in the natural gravity battery they have. And they've been using this alongside Swedes to absolutely rob Danes on both electricity costs and transit fees. Beggars can't be choosers, so Danes export de facto cheap/free electricity when their wind power is up, and import incredibly expensive electricity when its down. The other option is to let their grid go into full blackout every time wind is out, so they have exactly zero choice. This was very visible a couple of years ago when Swedish grid operator went full Darth Vader on them and told them they're trebling transit costs because what other choice do you have but to pay. But this also means that their interconnects are incredibly profitable money printers, so their throughput is massive (and therefore expensive) while remaining highly profitable because Danes will pay whatever they have to pay.
But there's one problem: There are no other locations on this planet that have this sort of geography. If you go to Norway for lessons on "how to do electric grid" and attempt to export this knowledge, you'll fail miserably because you won't have nearly 100% hydro based grid with massive natural gravity batteries across the entirety of the grid and a neighbor that is begging for you to build as many interconnects as you can because you're the only one who can unfuck their fucked up grid. Which means that solutions that work there are utterly useless everywhere else.
Small Population (Score:2)
This is such BS (Score:2)
OTOH, multiple papers have been written on America's ability to move our road-based transportation over to EVs. First one I read was clear back in the 80s. Back then, our grid (wiring), along with power supply (which was ~80% fossil fue
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Just accept it, buddy. There was a time when the United States would have been up to this challenge. That time has passed.
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Why? We have plenty of gas stations already. Electric vehicles make these places more lucrative in some ways.
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unless you have places where there aren't also gas stations, just add electrical charge stations to those
If there aren't any and electrical car range isn't enough, well you have a good business opportunity then
Also remember that norway is in the north of europe, with lot of ice and show, mountains and fjords, so to connect 2 towns in 10km direct range, you may need to travel 80km by road to reach there. It also have lower population density, so it can actually be harder for then than to the USA
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My point is that comparing Norway to the USA is very difficult. You can't just average the population density of a country that is 2
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Or you could buy a Tesla with a cobalt-free LFP battery.
Those are Chinese-made batteries, not much better, morally speaking
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Half the shit in your car is already made in China.
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Half the shit in your car is already made in China.
Haven't owned a car since 2004 & that was a German-made auto
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there are attempts to build card batteries without cobalt and other rare earth components, while maintain most of the current batteries capabilities.
and you can also use toyota and honda hydrogen cars
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Norway's grid relies mostly on hydropower (~91.5% in 2021), and they are a big exporter of oil so that they could subsidized their own hydro development by having other people burn their oil.
Hydro requires specific geological features, which are just not available in most places. Taking Norway as an example is the stupidest idea there is.
If you want a lot of EVs (as in replacing most of your ICE with EVs) not to collapse the grid, the solution has been known for quite a while: a shitload of baseload powerpl
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just like all investments, you lose money now so that later on you can get that money back, with profit if possible.
wind and solar are already the cheaper energy sources, cheaper than coal, nuclear and gas. So having the capability of having cheaper energy will translate in to saving that will slowly pay back that investment
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Norway easily met the demand as they had MASSIVE public investment in the grid and taxes on ICE cars to support it. Sure if we do the same we could easily support it too, but that is going to be 100's of billions in costs.
Billions Of Trillions, actually.
This cannot be done over mere decades. But it will eventually happen.
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"Most" ? Your source for this ?
EVs don't double the draw. The EV draw happens at night when the usual large draw appliances are normally off.
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Are you saying every power plant shuts down for maintenance every night for some period of time ? That seems a little bit unlikely.
As for the software, how long ago did you work on it ? Is possible things might have changed since ?
And even if not, wouldn't the software be able to account for the expected draw of cars charging from one night to the other, and only schedule a subset of power plants to shut down for maintenance at any given time ?
In terms of generation, rather than load, EVs are not huge.
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