WingNews

natch|4 years ago

Please stop downvoting the above comment. Sure, it is wrong thinking imho, but it is a doubt that a lot of people have, and it needs to be seen and addressed.

If we just downvote questions like this into oblivion, it kills the discussion and people continue on with their misconceptions, which never get addressed.

ypcx|4 years ago

OP here. The second sentence came out all wrong and the downvotes are deserved. What I was trying to ponder, was - given the summer blackouts (in certain areas) due to people running their ACs (more than on average) - how do we plan to cope with the advent of EVs.

So I did some googling[1] and apparently, until 2030 there's only 1 million EVs planned to hit the roads in the US, which is quite shocking given the dire trends of climate change and toxic pollution on this planet.

Another interesting fact is that the costs of extending the power grid will be passed on to all its consumers in the form of increased rates (as it should, because if you don't drive an EV, you should be "taxed" on the extra pollution your car creates).

[1] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2019/costs-revving-up-the-g...

handrous|4 years ago

Can confirm that this is a real concern In The Wild—even if it's not a good one—my (boomer, yes) uncle was just complaining to me a couple weeks ago that, "no-one's thought about how we're going to have enough electricity for all these electric cars".

rootusrootus|4 years ago

In my experience, many of the people who say things like this don't just have misconceptions, they have an axe to grind. In that case, preventing the spread of their misinformation may have more value than trying to 'educate' them.

wil421|4 years ago

No they wouldn’t. Steam turbines can take days to ramp up and connect to the grid. Several dams in my state barely reach full capacity and are not running 24/7. The co-op that supplies my power offers a flex plan that gives you free power from 11pm-6am. You’re supposed to schedule your car to charge during that time. If half the cars in my county did this nightly it would be easier to predict the nightly loads.

eldaisfish|4 years ago

For a forum focused on meaningful and substantive discussion, the amount of incorrect information around EVs and the power grid is shocking.

GP's point is a good one although there is work happening to address that very problem. The point stands, though. EVs are a significant bump in both power and energy and will require significant investment in shoring up grid capacity. Sad this is downvoted.

>Steam turbines can take days to ramp up and connect to the grid

How is this relevant here? Also, the typical steam turbine takes hours to spin up and sync to the grid, not days. I am not aware of any steam turbines that require burning two day's worth of fuel just to connect to the grid.

>Several dams in my state barely reach full capacity and are not running 24/7.

Again, how is this relevant in a broader context? Lots of places have dams running dry just as equally many have dams overflowing.

>The co-op that supplies my power offers a flex plan that gives you free power from 11pm-6am.

Ok? This is not par for the course so i'm nor sure why you're mentioning it.

>You’re supposed to schedule your car to charge during that time.

And if you can't? What if offices suddenly have 50 EVs charging at the same time? Will this not lead to a capacity constraint? If you broaden the horizon, can this not lead to a localised collapse of the grid due to a demand surge?

>If half the cars in my county did this nightly it would be easier to predict the nightly loads.

It would also lead to a huge surge in power at the times when solar output is literally zero.

ben_w|4 years ago

> The co-op that supplies my power offers a flex plan that gives you free power from 11pm-6am. You’re supposed to schedule your car to charge during that time.

One thing I’ve realised recently, is that while this is an improvement compared to the status quo, at some point we’re likely to be running houses off car batteries in these hours and charging the cars off PV during the day. By the continuum hypothesis, at some point the net average power transfer into/out of cars/any given car is going to be zero, and I wonder what that will look like economically?

RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago

> The co-op that supplies my power offers a flex plan that gives you free power from 11pm-6am.

Can you sign up for that plan and just mine Bitcoin during that time?

flyinghamster|4 years ago

Also, a major source of electrical demand is being systematically diminished: lighting. Energy-efficient lighting is more and more prevalent with each passing day.

Last year, my town's side streets were equipped with LED streetlights, which meant replacing 175W mercury-arc and 150W HPS fixtures with 40W LEDs that are noticeably brighter and produce a far more pleasant light.

fnord77|4 years ago

> The co-op that supplies my power offers a flex plan that gives you free power from 11pm-6am.

where are you? how are crypto miners not all over this?

jacquesm|4 years ago

But then it almost certainly wouldn't be free anymore.

tonyedgecombe|4 years ago

>If we tried to swich half the cars to electric overnight

It's a good job nobody is suggesting that then.

>Has anyone estimated the cost and time of upgrading the power grid for electric cars?

I don't know about the US but in the UK we just need to take generation back to 2002 levels to cover the whole fleet moving to electric.

Balero|4 years ago

I think the biggest issue in the UK is how to get cars parked on street to be charged overnight. In towns and cities (and elsewhere too) it is very common to park your car on the street, potentially a good distance away from your home. Where exactly to build the charging infrastructure for people parking like this.

I guess if you only need to charge at the same frequency as you would refuel you could have chargers in super market parking lots. Cars charge whilst you do your weekly shop. Or at work, if they have space.

I also heard about one idea to have chargers at every street light, as they already have an input from the grid in them.

Hopefully this is an issue that can be solved without having to re-wire huge portions of the urban areas.

rootusrootus|4 years ago

> If we tried to swich half the cars to electric overnight

Let's not, then. The logistics of swapping 150 million cars in a single night would be a nightmare. Charging wouldn't be my first concern.

On a more realistic note, even if we outlawed the sale of ICE cars today and mandated that every single new car hitting the road was electric, the required growth of the grid would be feasible. It would take quite a few years to replace the entire fleet.

ben_w|4 years ago

If we were to try to switch all vehicles to EV “overnight”, we’d almost certainly also mandate PV on all car rooftops.

I have observed that discussion of this solution normally divides into these two groups:

(1) “That’s ridiculous, a car covered in with PV will only make enough electricity to go 10-30 miles per day!”

(2) “That’s a great idea, a car covered with PV will make enough electricity to go 10-30 miles power day, and most people only go 12-35 miles per day!”

When there is serious concern if the grid can cope, we should take all the mitigations we can get. Reducing aggregate charging demand by 90% is good even when every single driver still needs to use an external charger.

jimrandomh|4 years ago

Car rooftops are a bad place for PV cells because in hotter climates, people park in the shade to avoid overheating their car's interior.

natch|4 years ago

Just because you can't think of a solution does not mean others have not already thought of solutions. Rooftop solar for example. Doesn't work for all buildings, but we are talking about the aggregate effect on the grid, which it does work for in most locales. In other locales, there are other solutions. You mention hydrogen. Pretty corrosive and explosive stuff, but maybe.