Global shockwaves from electric cars will be here sooner rather than later

Good paywalled piece on FT about the hedge/shift to LNG by the big petroleum players 'Big Oil bets on a dash for gas' https://www.ft.com/content/f23e35e0-92b5-11e7-bdfa-eda243196...

LNG is a big electricity creation fuel, escaping methane is the big pollution challenge.

Push for less nuclear? Where? Germany, Japan?

Anyways, electric cars are made for renewables (sans hydro) and nuclear that provide energy when it might not be needed but can be used for charging batteries instead. Gas will fill in the gaps, but it's on demand nature means it doesn't really become more useful like the other sources do with car electrification.

> build more power plants to support charging cars...

The bigger and engine is, the more efficient it typically is. Electric cars are already more clean even when you factor in the filthiest of power plants.

I would think not. Is a Tesla heavier than a comparable sized ICE vehicle?

I used to drive a Volt to work, where I had access to charging and Booster for the rarely needed gas fill-up. On days when my wife's Prius was low on gas, we'd switch cars and I'd fill it up while at work. We didn't visit a gas station for months with either car.

Unfortunately, we got rid of the Volt and I now ride my bike, so no charging and no Booster. The Prius tank now has to get below 0 on the gauge before either of us will find the time to go out of our way to a gas station.

I do 10k miles a year, the range on my car is about 90 miles effective in the summer and 70 in the winter. I charge fully every 2-3 days and top up on long journeys over 60/70 miles using the motorway chargepoints.

My bills have not really shifted - there may be an increase as the battery becomes less effective, and as winter sets in - but I'm due a new car in 8 months - as the pcp deal I have runs out then.

Home batteries would have to hold more than the car.

This will still put the baseline of the grid higher, just averages it out possibly taking more when its a good time. I think batteries should be hosted/hooked up by the power company, so they can attach them to a power management system. (I think that already exists)

I left out the "where will we get all this power" part, because that is already discussed a lot. I just wonder if the power grid will be able to handle this immense increase in usage, even if spread out. You still need to transport it.

edit: I think the powering down of offices and business makes enough room for the evening to use more.

With smarter grids that support dynamic realtime pricing of electricy to end users, I think electric cars, home batteries and even appliances like fridges, refrigerators and washing machines can help balance supply and demand in the grids, using electricity, pausing consumption or pumping it back into the grid as needed.

The UK government recently performed an industry consultation on this subject and has released a plan to:

* remove barriers to smart technologies (such as storage and demand-side response)

* enable smart homes and businesses

* improve access to energy markets for new technologies and business models

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/upgrading-our-ene...

peaks will happen if enough people do it at the same time. Almost every summer (maybe except this one), there's always that heat wave that taxes the grid. A solvable problem for sure (just like how we can now handle cell phone overload during emergencies) but lets not pretend the problem doesn't exist.

It may require that electric providers require deferred charging, even to the point they set when you can. While you could defer your charging don't expect that everyone will. As we see with charging stations in areas with more EVs there are those who just don't care. We need to instruct future owners the expected etiquette

What if something unusual happens? Imagine there is a long blackout during those 9pm to 6am hours. It doesn't have to be the entire city, just a significant number of homes. The next morning, thousands of drivers find they don't have enough power to get to work. Thousands of cars are suddenly charging beyond the expected 9pm to 6am window. Will the grid be able to handle full daytime load in addition to this huge unexpected load? How much would it cost to upgrade the grid to worst case scenario? (entire city blackout during 9pm to 6am)?

The average American drives about 55 miles per day. A typical EV uses about 300Wh per mile. That gives us a typical demand of about 17kWh of charging per day. A standard single-phase fast charger puts out 7kW and a three-phase fast charger puts out 22kW. There's plenty of opportunity to spread out that demand throughout the overnight off-peak period, because most EV users only need to charge for a couple of hours per day.

With smart metering, EVs can also feed energy back to the grid during transient demand peaks. Users won't notice if 5% of their battery is ringfenced for grid storage, but it'll provide a vast proportion of the storage capacity we need to manage an all-renewable grid.

Between the rebalancing of peak and off-peak demand and the potential to use EVs for grid storage, the widespread adoption of EVs is likely to be of net benefit to the electricity grid.

Which also reminds me of 120V 15A/20A charging, which the vast majority of EVs will likely use.

If every household hooks up, and all the trucks? Currently there is more investment in solar/wind, one is always unreliable and the other is certainly off at night. Now a grid of batteries might be enough to fill up the gaps today, but once that night slum is no longer a slum, who knows how big batteries you'll need.

This type of demand is far different from that 9.5% growth rate, and far more manageable, precisely because it happens during off-peak hours. At night, transmission lines are uncongested, and the wind (typically) blows more.

Thanks, that's some good info.

10kWh × 165M on the night grid, that's big impact.

I went and got the miles travelled per year and the total nr of vehicles, you are not far off. although we are forgetting that most traffic is during weekdays, and the size of the cars varies (and with it the usage) For convenience I don't do anything with the size of the cars.

"According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for 2012, there were 254,639,386 registered vehicles. Of these, 183,171,882 were classified as "Light duty vehicle, short wheel base", while another 50,588,676 were listed as "Light duty vehicle, long wheel base". Another 8,190,286 were classified as vehicles with two axles and six or more tires and 2,469,094 were classified as "Truck, combination". There were 8,454,939 motorcycles also listed along with 764,509 buses." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...

250m vehicles in us, if 150m of those are electrical at some point, and the number of miles driven total might be 3.5T miles by then (3.5×0.6=2.1T) 2.1/150m/313×1.6 (6 days of driving a week, and miles to km) comes to 71 km per day, which is 14 kWh (6/7 days) of required draw. I think it is manageable like you said, considering that it will take a while.

If most people used electric bicycles instead it would be about 1kWh per day instead +-100%, on tenth of the energy consumption, that would lead to more productive work hours, and less time spent at hospitals, and less issues with the big killer diseases affecting heart and lungs.

I was right with you until:

> an additional draw of 1kW per driver

> 100M additional electric cars ... 1,000GW

Looks like you're off by an order of magnitude; that should be:

1kw (continuous) * 100M drivers = 100GW (continuous)

for the typical commuting patterns. That's a lot of power of course, I agree it would increase cumulative consumer demand for electricity by about 25%.

But the key is that this is nearly perfectly dispatchable demand. It won't cause anything like the same disruption to the grid as non-dispatchable, or even weakly dispatchable demand like air conditioning (which can flex how much is consumed briefly, but will annoy users if it varies across too long a time span).

> Especially considering it'll take 10+ years for electric cars to be widely used by a significant fraction of the US workforce.

This is key, plus I think we're overstating how fast this will happen.

In 2016 we're still at sub 1% of all new car sales being electric, at 0.9%. i.e. for every 100 cars we're adding to our roads, not even one full electric car is added. Not to mention about half of the electric cars are hybrids.

Average age of cars is about 12 years. So if the 1:99 ratio is overturned say in a decade to favour electric cars (which seems ambitious itself[0]), it'll take at least another decade to phase out existing cars and see the fleet get replaced by new, mostly electric.

So 10+ I think is conservative, it's probably 20+.

Another thing to mention is that we can generate a lot more electricity with our existing capacity than we do. Why don't we? Because at night the demand simply isn't there. But with a software-based transport & fueling system that EV offer, a lot of this extra demand can be shifted during times of low-demand, without needing to install extra capacity, but rather just not taking as much capacity offline nightly.

Finally, I cautiously expect a shift away from personal transport and public transport, but towards semi-public/personal. i.e., I'd be quite feasible if you could hail a self-driving pod in 20 years, get in, have your destination set via whatever has replaced our smartphone (e.g. software assistent), and get out, paying automatically, a la uber today. The pod drives according to your personal wishes, but it's part of a shared public transport system. I expect this to make driving safer and more fuel efficient in driving behaviour, more efficient in terms of capacity (no more 4-seater cars full of 1 person, no more driving around with vacation-level storage that's mostly empty on 9/10 trips), more efficient in terms of size (lighter vehicles, less crumple zone required). This shift too may significantly increase the km per kwh spent in the next few decades.

[0] As for whether electric becoming the majority of car sales within 10 or 20 years is feasible... a little context: it must be noted that the US sold 96k electric vehicles in 2013. In 2016 it's 157k. Growth rates are a little under 18% yoy. If you'd grow at 32% a year, which is twice the annual growth rate compared to the past few years, you'd sell 2.5 million electric vehicles in 2026, annually. But the US sells more than 17 million non-electrics annually today, so you're still not making a huge dent. That's a shitty calculation of course, but it's some context. Typical forecasts predict something like 30% of new car sales to be electric in 2030. Again, that's new sales. About 8% of cars are retired each year, if you replace them by 30% electric cars, it takes about a decade after 2030 to even get to 30% of the actual car fleet to be electric.

So all in all, I don't really think the grid is the biggest challenge here, although there are obviously very large investments to be made.

EVs at home charge at night, solar panels produce energy during the day.

Charging time:

In the US, houses commonly have from the grid 100 A at 230 V. So, that is

100 x 230 = 23,000 W (Watts)

or 23 KW (kilowatts).

For an electric car with a 75 KWh battery, the charging time using all the house power would be

75 / 23 = 3.26

hours. Maybe the house needs also to use an electric stove, electric clothes dryer, air conditioning, a water pump, a microwave oven, some lights, etc. so wants to use only half the house power for the car charging in which case the charging time would be

75 / (23 / 2) = 6.52

hours.

From a Google search, supposedly at

https://www.tesla.com/models

is

"With unparalleled performance delivered through Tesla's unique, all-electric .... will achieve the maximum charge rate of 11.5 kW for 75 kWh configured vehicles."

Then the minimum charging time would be

75 / 11.5 = 6.52

hours.

So, net, for an electric car, I'd be concerned about charging time.

With a gasoline powered car, can fill up in a few minutes.