California approves $768M for electric vehicles
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
relevant parts: “In Southern California, lower-than-average hydro generation may create challenges as natural gas-fired generation, the replacement for hydro production shortfalls in past years, may be limited due to reduced gas storage capacity and local pipeline outages in the region."
"Limited operations at Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, plus state rule changes reducing the rate at which natural gas may be injected and withdrawn from storage, may complicate pipeline operations."
the sky isn't falling.
(the Daily Caller is a right-wing rag - Ann Coulter is a columnist, for chrissakes)
There hasn't been a Stage 3 emergency (with potential rolling blackouts) since 2001, and nothing worse than Stage 1 (and only two of those) since 2007.
The math is supposed to work out but, like you said, basically the overabundance of "green" energy doesn't do anything for domestic energy markets. It is implicitly earmarked for export consumption rather than domestic consumption. Energy managers get to reap the benefits twice, with both domestic and export prices remaining high rather than domestic prices continuously falling as supply comes online.
The same song gets played out all over, throw carbon credits into the mix and things can get pretty silly pretty quickly.
More information: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuarhodes/2018/04/30/no-wind...
The customer cost structure although is inverted based on generation, and not on grid fees. He also talked about how the CA govt uses them as a subsidy funding source and that can create a state where PG&E is close to insolvency sometimes.
He also talked about the utility death spiral: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-th...
PG&E has expended large sums on lobbying, particularly against expansion of public power companies into areas PG&E currently serves.
Presumably your friend would explain this has PG&E charitably protecting it's opportunity to lose money, but I think that doesn't quite reflect the reality.
Their distortion of public policy through lobbying is a bad thing, but their incentives are actually pretty understandable given the wacko market structure.
That doesn't explain why, if the market is regulated in such a way that PG&E is losing money serving customers to the point of near insolvency, they spend large amounts of money fighting the transfer of those money-losing customers to expansion of municipal utilities.
1. Pushing liability for disasters (natural and artificial) from the company onto customers and taxpayers.
2. Getting regulators to allow them to lower the safety margins on their infrastructure (a major cause behind the San Bruno explosion).
3. Fighting Community Choice Aggregation programs, which sound most similar to what you describe.
CCA programs are not as you described - they would not remove PG&E from the electricity market in cities. Rather, they allow cities to generate or purchase their own electricity and deliver it over PG&E grids. As I described, this takes away PG&E's major revenue stream (per-kWh rates) while leaving them with their fixed cost (grid maintenance).
No, I'm taking about campaign spending (lobbying was imprecise) against things like the recent move to expand SMUD service area into West Sacramento. (Not the only recent proposed public utility expansionart they've opposed, but the one I'm most familiar with.)
In the small scale, producing infrastructure that can bill your meter going both ways only increases the cost.
But in the large scale, not having to build and maintain more high-power distribution towers across hundreds of miles of difficult to access terrain decreases cost.
You can't plop down a coal plant in a city, but you still have some freedom to choose its location, and you can scale it to the needs of the local area and just burn as much as you need. Meanwhile, solar and wind might go way down for a whole day or more, and so you need to ship energy from where it's being generated.
At some point those cars can actually be part of the grid's storage capacity, if the infrastructure is built to allow the car to put some of it's capacity back onto the grid during low availability. EV drivers willing to have 20% of their battery be drained when they need to drive can get paid a small amount for leaving their vehicle plugged in while not in use.
For those of us not in this space, what's the difference between transmission and distribution?
Distribution is from a local transformer (substation) where high voltage gets turned to lower voltage (12 kV) and then sent via utility poles to your home. Near your home there will be a utility pole with a transformer that brings the voltage down to 110. You share that transformer with a handful of neighbors.
Your best bet will eventually be to just go off grid by installing solar on your roof and use it all up during the day by either using it (laundry, dishwashing in the morning, heat/cool the house to the ideal temperature in the late afternoon before you get home - i.e. thermal battery) or storing it.
You're absolutely right.
Here in Marin county, you can opt in to using renewable energy, which my wife and I have. The public renewable utility rate is significantly cheaper than the standard PG&E rate. However, I am forced to pay more than the actual cost that the public renewable utility charges, because -- due to California state law -- my electric bill comes from PG&E, who -- despite not making the electricity -- has responsibility to charge the consumer. Of course, PG&E charges a 'convenience and distribution' fee that eradicates the difference in pricing between the renewable resource and their own electricity. Note that, if I opt in to using PG&E generated electricity, they kindly 'waive' the fee. Thus, despite the renewables being cheaper, I do not get the benefit as the consumer.
I have contacted my state senator and representative, and they sent me back a form e-mail about how they are 'standing' up to PG&E. Give me a break.... this is something that is easily legislated.
I understand your frustration that the amount of the fee cancels out the cheaper cost of renewables in your case, but providing local distribution has a cost (maintenance of poles, wires, etc) over and above the actual energy generation cost, so there will always be a fee for this, unless you figure out a way to get the renewables to your house without the local distributor (and assuming that you don't put solar/batteries on your house).
Also, there is a cost (for storage, load dispatching, frequency regulation, etc) to turning the variability of renewables into the steady stream of available power that consumers expect.
Again, it's possible even including the cost of all of these necessary services, the renewables should still be cheaper than the non-renewables, but it's never going to be zero.
In fact, passing it on to the consumer as an option doesn't make any sense to me. The utility negotiates bulk price and averages it out for consumers. If anything the conversation with the utility should be entirely about matching behavior to supply and/or dynamic pricing, and not at all about renewable vs non-renewable voltage.
But it's marketed specifically as a program where you pay a premium to fund the greening of the grid [1][2]. It actually states that you will pay a premium for this plan.
1. https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-vehicles/opt...
2. https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/PG-E-s-eco-friendly-...
But we're not there yet, so PG&E needs to find ways to not lose money on the grid hookup for customers who buy cheap forms of energy (or are, godforbid, energy-neutral with relation to the grid).
You’re either hooked up or you’re not. Or you run multiple “grids” somehow which seems more economically wasteful and is legislatively tricky in terms of rights (to run lines, overhead or underfoot).
It seems like the cost of maintaining poles and transformers goes up a lot every year...
How to keep them honest?
It seems like you would have to regulate to the point of ($pure distribution company) being essentially a government enterprise in all but name.
Splitting the company into a 1) a government or quasi-government enterprise to handle the parts not suitable to the market, and 2) a much-less-regulated company handling the more market-amenable activities, could give the system as a whole a lot more of the efficiencies of a market system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
The problem is that utilities want it both ways. They want to charge you peak usage despite the fact that "peak" generation is actually becoming one of the cheapest times for power.
If they allowed free-market pricing in that power they could easily find a use for "curtailment" -- people would crank their ACs or charge their cars if the price kWh dropped below a certain point.
This is why California is moving to Time of Use rates (TOU) in late 2019/2020 (depending how they push off the date due to IT challenges).
It's really more about corruption than anything else. PG&E still charges vastly increased rates in California despite huge drops in wind and solar prices.
That is probably a bit more complex and a bit harder than you are implying. Attempts to interconnect the main grids are large projects that take many years to do. The Tres Amigas SuperStation is an attempt to unite the Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection) and the Texas Interconnection). First announced in 2008. It will carry 5 GW of power which seems like a lot until you consider that the US uses about 4,000 terawatt hours per year,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation
>...It's really more about corruption than anything else. PG&E still charges vastly increased rates in California despite huge drops in wind and solar prices.
PG&E gets maybe 10% of their power from solar, Much of that power they have to pay the RETAIL rate for since rooftop solar is heavily subsidized - of course it is going to have to increase what it charges other people.
I find Slicon Valley Power's prices to be reasonable. But they only serve a very tiny fraction of the population (Santa Clara, basically).If they can do it, it means the problem lies elsewhere.
It's opt-in-by-default for new accounts as they're rolling it out neighborhood by neighborhood, but you can still opt-out of it.
If you are a reader that is not well-versed in how the grid works, please disregard the parent's comment.
I work in this space. I view this noisemaking as harmful to the public as they likely do not fully understand how the electricity delivery system (the grid) works, and this only serves to infuriate them and increase distrust.
Funny thing with utilities. They are a sort of commons, yet always regarded as evil until proven innocent.
It would be much better for the perception if there were a clean split in the business of the utilities where the distribution monopoly does just distribution and nothing else. But I'm not sure if that would actually solve any real problems.
I'm a bit confuse here. I thought utilities are regulated what is the reasoning for them being evil?
Yeah they're natural monopolies but they also regulated. I get that Enron mess California over but they got caught. What shady things that the electric companies in California are doing?
Utilities typically own generation plants as well as the high voltage transmission lines that transport electricity to consumers which then have their voltage lowered (think of a transformer as a device that lowers pressure) before going over smaller distribution lines into your house. Long ago, competition was fierce, so utilities went to the government and asked to be regulated. This caused forced consolidation and they began to effectively serve as monopolies and make a modest return on investment each year. In those days demand was fairly easy to forecast. The utility would make sure they always had enough generation online plus some extra to cover any emergencies like a unit tripping offline. The grid worked like this for decades and costs were fairly cheap. If the utility needed to build a new nuclear plant (example) they would have to go to the state commission and get them to approve raising the rates. Now, although rates were fairly cheap, there was a push to deregulate things. In theory, markets are less efficient in some ways, but more in others such as incentivizing new and more efficient technology. Remember the regulated utility doesn't make any more money by doing research and risking new technology.
With deregulation, we moved to the RTO/ISO model where lots of utilities band together and work with an RTO/ISO. The RTO/ISO chooses which units run via optimization. It wants to find a way to serve all the customers in the region, plus provide backup power, and do it very cheaply. Remember how the utility has to keep extra units online in case one trips? By banding together into what is known as a "pool" you can save lots of money as far fewer units need to be online as backup. The RTO/ISO does this as well. It also knows the cost of each unit and chooses the cheapest ones. This is slowly forcing more costly fossil fuels to retire as they simply aren't as economical. This causes an issue as even though wind/solar is awesome, it isn't as reliable as a massive coal plant with months of fuel waiting to be used. Making sure there are no blackouts is VERY important to grid operators. The industry is scrambling to address these issues as fast as possible, but it is a tough issue. Deregulation is a weird word as utilities are still regulated, but there are now market forces coupled into it as well helping push progress forwards. I hope that helps a bit!
But now it's in Adobe Captivate, which is apparently what Adobe has convinced some former Flash users to use. Doesn't work in Firefox and tries to get me to install Chrome. Useful info, though. Explains clearly what a power grid does every day.
Old System- Centrilised generation distributed over a wide network.
New System - Decentralised Generation, distributed over a wide network.
Without knowing any specifics, wouldn't this increase the expected traffic through the network from something like O(N) to no. consumers to something like O(N^2)? With an associated increase in required infrastructure and maintenance costs? Could be quite expensive.
The economic dispatch that CAISO runs optimizes for the cheapest dispatch to meet load and reserves like the other north American grid operators like ERCOT, PJM...etc. That is essentially the market driving things along with CPUC decisions. If you're unhappy with how California is treating renewables know that California is on the bleeding edge in this area where more has changed in the past 10 years than the previous 80.
Interesting that they're focusing on these high-utilization vehicles, you'd have thought that a percentage of bus transport and a percentage of freight or delivery transport would already fit the right profile for electric vehicles. For instance UPS or DHL must have some routes which have a lot of deliveries in a small area, in the centre of towns or cities, which are stop start for deliveries and for traffic. Using electric vehicles under those circumstances seems like an open goal.
It does seem like the right place to make a public investment, though, that will be one of the first areas where electric vehicles will be the hard-nosed cheapest option.
Especially given the money will presumably go in part to public institutions like schools, which can potentially reduce bills, certainly in the long-run.
I need to see a spreadsheet or something.
So, mostly corporate welfare.
"place an emphasis on installing charging stations in disadvantaged communities or in facilities — such as ports — that tend to be located near low-income neighborhoods."
But they are going to dispense the corporate welfare in the general vicinity of poor people, so the poor people can get some vicarious enjoyment out of watching people who are already rich eat a free lunch.
Unless the battery isn't owned by you, it won't work as well.
Compressed gas cylinders sort of work this way. When you 'refill' a cylinder you just swap the empty one for a full one. You can even swap different sizes as needed. Which might also be useful for trucks.
1) Essentially requires a standard battery form factor. Tesla alone already has between 8 and 13 batteries (not bothering to check if e.g. the Model S 60 is the same as the Model X 60). Throw in other manufactures and any future Tesla sizes and this becomes infeasible pretty quickly as your "gas station" begins to look like a warehouse.
2) Warranty. When you're swapping out the most expensive part of the car several times a week, what happens when you get a dud? Is it covered by Tesla's warranty, the swap service, or are you just screwed?
Or, what if I trade in my 8 year old essentially depleted battery for a brand new one? Obviously I should pay some sort of "upgrade" fee, but tracking that will be a headache.
Gogoro is doing quite well with scooters, because the battery pod is small enough to swap by hand.
I get that switching in $10,000 of hardware is kind of a big thing, but the question is like asking about how can I be sure every station has real gasoline (which hey, with ethanol, they don't!).
I think battery swap doesn't make sense for passenger cars because as the guy said once you hit 200 miles of range charging isn't an issue. And having to stop and charge for an hour and a half every three hours on a long distance trip isn't the end of the world. Especially since you could roll those into lunch and dinner stops.
But likely makes some sense for large trucks.
The hour sure matters to me, I hate being in the "travel" part of a trip like that.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...
California has 172,138 miles of maintained roads, 63,856 if we don't include "Local" roads.
There are certainly many stretches of road in the state that could use charging stations in order to be accessible by EV.
I think the parallel here is to cell phones.
If you cell phone battery sucks, you're probably carrying around a portable charger, and a usb+wall charger.
However if your phone normally goes ~2 days without a charge then you can simply charge nightly at home without carrying a portable battery and/or cable + wall plug everywhere you go.
Vehicle emissions contributes to as much as 50k premature deaths each year, tax dollars have been spent on worse things.
http://news.mit.edu/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-e...
There are far too few chargers, specially outside the bay area (and even in the Bay, considering the number of cars already in the streets). EV will be more convenient than ICEs when you have both high range + charger availability.
About 1/3 of the time I'm doing this, I end up waiting in line for 20-45 minutes behind someone else anyway before I can start charging. I imagine this will only worsen if more infrastructure isn't built.
My wife and I have 2 vehicles, and only one is EV largely because of this issue. There are too many places I can't go with an EV without significant risk of being stranded. Stranded in this case may mean waiting 4 hours to charge up at the more common Level-2 chargers.
My EV can get me to the airport and with a bit of charging only just get me home. A ride share is $40+ off peak. Public transit isn't an option. If I lived further out in the suburbs such a trip wouldn't be possible without more prolonged charging.
You might balk at dropping $40+ spontaneously but a lot of people don't. I remember working a salaried position and still not being able to afford a spontaneous invitation to lunch with coworkers and I have never in my life been in financial trouble.
EVs might be practical in a dense Urban setting with access to Public transit but the further you are from urban centers the less practical it becomes exponentially.
The fact that EVs are practical in dense urban settings is great since those have the largest air quality problems that can be addressed by the centralized (or green) power generation that EVs utilize.
Never may be too strong a word. Electricity is likely to continue flowing to more locations for longer than petrol stations will continue to get restocked.
There is a DC fast-charger at a walgreens not far from where I live that is broken 90% of the time (*not scientific) and always reports available online.
Some people might consider 1-2 45min supercharging stops between SF and San Diego to be too much to tolerate, but wait until you tell them they've got to wait 3 or 4+ hours at a chargepoint station instead -- especially given that the charging infra isn't as tightly coupled to the in-car experience (maps, realtime charger info, etc).
I don't feel like I can trust random public chargers to exist and be available. Even at work, where we have 14 chargepoint chargers, they're all taken by 9am. I'm sure if I got plugged in (hah!) to the correct slack groups I'd be able to figure out when I can shuffle my car in, but realistically, you can only rely on home charging today.
1. I assume you're probably only using 60 or maybe 70mi, tops, of that range -- so you're talking minimum charging 3-4x as often as you'd be filling up with a gas car. (yes, I recognize that you probably change at home most of the time; of course, the shorter the range the more likely it is that you'll need to charge 'on the road' rather than at home)
2. What do you mean by DC fast-charge? In researching ChargePoint (I just became a member), it looks like most stations are 220v and something like 20a; even the ones that have higher current feeds are typically split in half if 2 cars are using it. I agree, 20 minutes to charge is hardly an unreasonable amount of time, considering how rarely one should have to charge away from home. But on a roadtrip, again, 20mins every hour starts adding up really fast.
Generally, though, I think people should spend less time worrying about day-to-day charging time (as opposed to roadtrip charging time), because they ignore fuelling time of gas cars. Let's say you spend 5 minutes a week filling up your gas car. That's 4 1/3 hours per year filling up (assuming we ignore any special trips made to the gas station. Thankfully we live across the street from one, but it's still not unusual to hop in the car after dinner and spend 10min driving to get gas to prepare for a trip the next day just to have one less thing to do in the morning, for example). Vs with an electric car where your charging time is effectively 0 if you plug it in at home every night or once a week or whatever. Then, of course, on a roadtrip, the times are flipped; do a thousand miles and you might only spend 15-20mins fuelling a gas car but maybe 2h charging an electric (depending on charge rate, again.. this is more supercharger speed we're talking about).
My father (long since retired) actually loves the charging breaks with his Model S on roadtrips; 1-2x 45min stops along the way from San Diego to Phoenix, or San Diego to SF, for example. He likes relaxing, stretching, chatting with other owners, .. feels in less of a hurry to race to his destination, etc. I'm sure a lot of this is down to the novelty factor and justifying one's purchase, but I also get it-- it's just a different way of thinking.
The 10 minutes I spend filling my fuel tank every other week (including time to get there, it is on my route home but I have to cross a stoplight I normally turn right at) is ultimately less time that you spend charging your electric car.
Of course I fill my tank as part of a different errand, not a fill the tank now to be ready for the morning. This does change the calculation somewhat. I also don't know exactly how long it takes you to plug in and unplug that cable, if you normally park such that you walk past the charging port, and you just toss the cable wherever when done this can be much quicker. If your car door is next to your house door, but have to walk to the other side of the car, and then as a neat freak you carefully coils the cable up it will be longer.
But if you're filling every other week you either have a massive 25-35 gallon tank, or you don't drive much. And if you're not driving much, you're probably not charging much, either :)
If I had a Leaf or eGolf I'd probably want to charge every day regardless; with something with 200-300 miles range, it certainly wouldn't be a daily thing.
If I got a 200-300 mile range I'd set the battery charge to max life and charge daily, which I understand is the way to have the battery last the longest.
Surely it doesn't take more than 2-3 mins to fill a car with petrol/diesel? Certainly don't think it's ever taken me any longer than that, unless I'm on a big journey and I need a break.
1. Gustine (https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&search=North%20America&boun...)
2. Kettleman City (https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&search=North%20America&boun...)
3. Tejon Ranch (https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&search=North%20America&boun...)
4. Burbank (https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&search=North%20America&boun...)
5. Temecula (https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&search=North%20America&boun...)
The Model X 75D has 237 miles range. At 504 miles total trip time, you should have had to make exactly 2 stops along the way. 5 would be completely unnecessary.
Also I'd be shocked if anyone got the rated miles but you're definitely not going to get the rated miles up the Grapevine.
Remember, hills require more energy to climb, but you regain the energy on descent which is captured by regenerative braking. It's not 100%, but it's efficient enough that it doesn't make a significant difference. And, again, driving 20 mph through some switchback curves is a hell of a lot less wind resistance than driving 75mph on the freeway.
I still say you need some evidence to back up the claim that you got less than half the rated range on a Tesla. You better believe the media would be all over it if that were true.
You're absolutely going to not get the rated battery life there.
Obviously if you only go up but not down that's a different story, but mountainous driving is not nearly so hard on range if it's a net of 0.
Makes me wonder if a solar panel hood/roof would help any.
Is that necessarily true? The 75D has a curb weight of 5,140 pounds, which would require a fair amount of energy to get moving from a standing stop. While aerodynamic drag would certainly tax the powertrain to maintain 75 MPH (op didn’t specify anyway), one would expect the overall range at such speeds to be greater than in stop-and-go traffic. Or are regenerative brakes really that efficient at recapturing energy?
Looking up published mileage of say a Tesla X, Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, and Toyota Prius, all but the X have better city mileage than highway mileage (but the X is 86 MPGe city vs 89 highway, so even then it's only 3% difference).
That's the neat thing about electrics and hybrids -- the "you get better highway mileage" intuition gets flipped by regenerative braking.
This may not be true for Teslas. Most EVs and hybrids will increase their regenerative braking when the brake pedal is pressed, and use mixed braking at slow speeds and hard stops. Teslas, however, maintain a constant rate of regeneration when not accelerating, and apply the mechanical brakes when the brake pedal is pressed, without increasing regeneration. Thus, Teslas waste most of their energy as heat when not driven in one-pedal mode.
My Camry Hybrid has a "CHG" section on the lower "tachometer", where the needle dips when I press the brake pedal. Braking carefully to a full stop from freeway speeds regenerates enough energy to maintain 35-40 mph for 10-15 miles. Often I can get above the estimated 40mpg (sometimes over 50mpg) in stop-and-go freeway traffic, rolling along on battery, only using the engine for a few seconds to occasionally sharply accelerate.
The Model 3's abysmal (and recently improved) stopping distance may have something to do with this. Many EV enthusiasts tout the reduced stopping distance benefit of mixed braking. However, Teslas do not currently perform this sort of mixed braking, so they miss out on this benefit. Could it be a software update away?
Unless you're braking hard for an unexpected stop, one pedal driving can easily slow you from 75mph down to almost 0 on a freeway off ramp (and recover that kinetic energy as charge).
The rest of your comment is fine. If something doesn't add up or make sense, you can always express that without accusing someone of lying; for example, by asking a simple question.
Of course, the model X is also sort of a worst case scenario because it's the least efficient car they sell.
IIRC my parents stopped 3x from Peninsula to San Diego (well, okay, north county) in their S 75d. But they didn't start with a full charge either, and on top of that, typical users only charge to 80-90% on a regular basis, and only cram it full for roadtrips. They could definitely make it in 2.
With a LR Model 3 you could definitely do the drive in 1 stop but it depends on the exact location; IIRC Atascadero is a little too close to SF and Buellton is a little too close to SD. On the other hand, with the proliferation of superchargers, the increasing number of options makes it a bit easier to YOLO it and then stop short even if it means a stop for a quick charge only 20-50mi from your destination.
Or would the weight be more than a (future model) Leaf could easily be designed to pull?
The gas range extender though means that you can take your EV on a road trip and refuel in a matter of minutes. Overnight you charge, but during the day, you fill up along the way.
Or maybe highways could have electric cables that the cars could latch onto and recharge with on long trips.
From a pure economic point of view, this is literally tax-money that will help the top 10% buy EVs more easily (because the other 90% cannot afford anything else than traditional vehicles). It is literally subsidizing a lifestyle on Tax Money.
If this made sense economically, people would buy EVs without the need for state and federal subsidies.
It also explicitly places an emphasis on placing stations in disadvantaged communities, and focuses on heavy duty vehicles including buses. This is not primarily putting in Tesla charging stations.
The point I'm making is that I would like to see EVs succeeding without the need for the governement to step in. With the governement stepping in, they are essentially giving free money to people that don't need it in the first place.
> San Diego Gas & Electric Co. will provide rebates for as many as 60,000 customers to install home charging stations and offer installation services, for a total of $136.9 million.
Using "virtue signaling" is the "virtue signaling" of the right.
The wording "virtue signaling" is indeed not the best in this context, but what I was trying to say is that because green energy is so hyped right now, this bill is riding on that positive wave to the point where the economical hard questions that should be asked for any government subsidies are not always asked correctly (or overlooked more easily).
Absolutely! Anything that'd move us a step away from oil and it's constant cost in human life would be a step in the right direction.
> what I was trying to say is that because green energy is so hyped right now...
To be fair, green energy is hyped right now because it's one of the fastest growing job sectors. There's a reason China is betting big on it. California is trying to ride that wave (or rather, stay on that wave) and see how far it'll take us. Tesla alone employs some ~30k people, while the whole coal industry in the US employs ~50k. Why wouldn't California want to encourage companies looking to build "green energy" solutions to bring their job openings here?
Like everything else, this is a bet. I guess we'll know whether it pays off in a few years.
Not quite a supercharger, but not too shabby. Faster than my Level 2 home charger.
From near-zero I can get enough to drive home (40mi) in 20m.
Most fast charging stations have both major standards, and Tesla owners (like Mac owners) gotta dongle.
At least early on, the main beneficiaries of this will be affluent people. That is hard to avoid when you're trying to incentivize a new technology (early adopters usually tend to be wealthier, for obvious reasons), but at least they could have funded this from general state revenue.
But instead they seem to want to get the money from utility customers. That seems like one of the most regressive forms of "taxation" imaginable... pretty much everyone uses electricity, and while bigger households use more, the multiplier will certainly be much smaller than the one for income.
Then there are industrial and commercial customers, for sure, but it seems equally misguided to specifically increase the burden on productive activity (rather than, say, on investment income, whose taxation would contribute to the general revenue).
[1]https://www.pge.com/care [2] https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...
This money could have funded public transport which would have had a similar outcome and benefited more low and middle income people.
Man, I'm shocked by how ambivalent I am to this. There must be some political backstory I'm missing. Somebody's nephew 7 years ago started working on something, that guy has since moved out of state, and it's surely tied up with his tax attorney representing someone involved in a secondary suit related to Vinod Khosla's gate across the path to Martin's Beach.
Meanwhile, an electric car is still laughably impractical for anyone living in an apartment.
Plus, this isn't the limit of the charging infrastructure spend. It's just a one-off budget approval. There can (and will!) be more invested.
I think a billion dollar investment in something like this is a great start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_production_plug... take a look, you wouldn't give some of these a second glance. You have to look at the badging in a lot of cases.
We finally force mobile phone manufacturers to use USB standard, and now cars are all over the place.
Crazy to have Tesla only charging spots.
You can thank the European Commission for that one.
I don't see the problem. I own both a BMW i3 and a Tesla Model 3, and I can charge both with any public Chargepoint charger. The BMW i3 even supports level 3 DC fast charging just like the Tesla, although I don't believe Tesla will let you use their Supercharger network for a non-Tesla vehicle.
Now who do I have to nag to get laws passed compelling landlords to install charging infrastructure for tenants?
This is my main barrier to replacing my antique with an EV; most of the rentals I'm likely to occupy will not have access to charging.
It's a major investment in infrastructure, this is the reality of EVs.
I don't know how street parking gets handled at all, it almost requires wireless charging through the asphalt activated by simply parking over it.
edit:
At least until car batteries can be recharged as quickly as a gas tank is filled, then this is largely a non-issue. We're not there yet are we?
CA should give the rental property owners an economic incentive to preemptively install the infrastructure. It's a very real barrier to adoption when you can't assume your next apartment will be able to charge your car immediately upon move-in.
The problem is it costs $500 for the meter plus labor (add another $1k for the charger and labor to hook the charger to the meter).
So, we can discuss who is best incentivized to cover the fixed installation costs, but the "free gas" argument is irrelevant -- you just add the dedicated meter to your account.
Your apartment does provide you with a minimum standard of infrastructure to run electrical appliances however, and it's not ridiculous or unbelievable for you to expect it.
I think what you're missing is EVs have turned the automobile into another consumer electronics appliance. It's an oversized smartphone on wheels, surveillance features and all.
Are you saying that since there's an agenda to reduce vehicle ownership altogether we shouldn't reduce barriers to EV ownership? That will only result in more ICE vehicle ownership, which is an absolute disaster from a climate change environmental crisis mode perspective.
A significant factor with vehicles is they have a long servicable lifetime. Every year we drag on with people buying ICE vehicles instead of EVs is followed by decades of those additional ICE vehicles burning fossil fuels.
Do you think we can achieve accessible alternative transportation solutions sooner than we can get hookups installed in all the already electrified rentals for EVs already available on the market? I don't think so.
My apartment doesn't provide a hookup for my MIG/TIG welder, and I'd be hard pressed to say whether more people own welders or EVs. Besides, more people drive gas powered cars, and like you conveniently ignored, very few apartments provide on-site gas pumps either.
How many Americans have EVs is largely irrelevant. We're talking about California, and the figure of interest would be current and future California tenants having personal automobiles. This is about faciliating a future of widespread EV adoption in California.
If tenants can reliably expect @home charging, even if it's just at a relatively low-current overnight pace, it turns the EV ownership story into substantially better than ICE vehicles.
You're arguing as if we shouldn't be exceeding the quality and convenience of the existing ICE vehicle ownership experience. The whole point is EVs enable a better situation because electricity isn't gasoline, and you can (and already do) have it dispensed out of your outlets at home.
Without taking advantage of this difference, unless we get EVs that can charge in a matter of minutes at the "pump", I'm afraid they won't substantially displace ICEs.
We're getting enough solar on the grid that every spring we choose not to generate massive amounts of otherwise free electricity during the day.
Rather than having stationary grid storage, dumping that the cars of people who are at work will provide a huge amount of grid flexibility.
I'm not a huge fan of parking requirements in code, but it's a simple addition to require chargers for X% of the spots. The second part of the challenge is getting payment structures in place.
Ideally utilities would be pushing forward with their own scheme so that charging would go directly to your usual utility bill. That way there's no middleman taking an extra 30% - 100% cut on the cost of the electricity, it reuses a convenient billing channel, and it also lets the utility start to do demand response to manage their oversupply of renewables.
But utilities are both too short-sighted and boneheaded to realize that this could be a major win for them. They ought to be paying more attention because increased efficiency is decreasing demand for prior electricity loads.
The only place owning an EV is actually environmentally friendly in North America is Quebec since 95% is generated by Hydro.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-numbers-are-in-an...
And—to your point—they get cleaner every year.
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life...
a few quotes from the pdf
"For this analysis we expected the midsize and full-size BEV to need only one lithium-ion battery pack over its lifetime." of 179,000 miles
"Excluded from the life cycle assessments are the global warming emissions from building the infrastructure (such as factories and industrial equipment) required to do all of the processing and assembling, and the emissions from transportation of raw materials for manufacturing."
"we had limited data on the actual composition of the vehicle models"
"Comparing our results with other battery literature(. . .), the emissions (kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of battery weight) depend on the battery chemistry. These estimates are on the lower end of the spectrum for battery-production global warming emissions because they derive from process-level analyses. The alternative approach—top-down methods, which refer to how the battery production energy is assessed— results in higher estimates because the scope of the assessment is large"
and especially relevant to your point and the article you linked, which reads, "the extra emissions from making an 80-mile range EV (compared to a similar gasoline car) are about 15% higher"
from quoted report "for this study we assumed a lifetime of 179,000 miles, both for gasoline and long-range battery-electric vehicles, based on the National Household Travel Survey (FHWA 2009) data for the first 15 years of a vehicle’s lifetime. However, we posited an exception for the 84-mile-range BEV and comparable gasoline car—that total mileage would be 135,000—75 percent of the mileage of the 265-mile-range BEV. This difference is due to “range limitations” of a car with a more modest-sized battery: its driver would likely be unwilling to drive long distances very often, given the frequent need for stopping to “fill up” "
And then there is the whole mystery meat of the supply chain that produce all of the components, which don't seemed to be very shrewdly represented if at all. There is a lot more CO2 produced than just extraction>refinement. I'm really not confident in scientists ability to gauge the resource consumption of industry.
There aren't that many clean energy options available to the end consumer right now, other than solar. You could have a wind turbine which could run day/night, but they're just not as cheap per watt, and has far fewer competitors on the market making that stuff.
If you install workplace chargers, though, you can charge at peak solar production.
Why? It shifts air pollution out of urban centers.
Or Washington, or Oregon.
Or some point in the near future as the grid transitions to cleaner generation options.
If you have more EVs running, there is more incentive to upgrade the power generation structure, because it produces more environmental benefit.
Also, come on, the minority of generation comes from gas, but you are calling it "methane powered ICs by proxy". That looks like extremely motivated reasoning (to put it charitably).
Not true. Even if it were true most of the oil industry is losing money hand over fist.
But not as fast as the phony baloney "renewable" industry is, even with its insane subsidies.
People can't wrap their heads around the fact that sane estimates of the energy supply of the future do not support cars. People will be walking and biking and riding buses. The future is a place with far fewer cars.
But public transportation is better of course. Make it electric while you are at it.
You shouldn't be upset about solving several problems in parallel.
A quick check on the DOE website shows 95% of power generated in Washington is 0 CO2. And we export it to neighboring states.
Not to mention, power generation has benefits of scale. One stationary 10,000hp engine is more efficient than 10,000 mobile 1hp engines.
But more to the point, you are right for the moment in that the source of electricity in California is 35~50% Natural Gas, but that source/dependance will most likely change. There's no reason why provisioning for this outcome is a bad idea. Especially since switching to EV has other benefits than simply not burning Fossil Fuels.
The difference is, the ICE I buy today pollutes more every year (due to wear) until it leaves service. There is no way to upgrade it or decrease its impact.
The EV I buy today might not be a lot better, but as new plants and solar come online, it pollutes less as time goes on. This will almost certainly be the case in practice.
EV is the right choice for most vehicles.
- More than 50% of the energy source in EVs being renewable is irrelevant towards being environmentally friendly when being compared to 0% in conventional - Renewable energy as a fraction of overall energy in California is not projected to rise in the next 5 years - An EV using electrically from a powerplant has the same overall fuel efficiency as a conventional vehicle using fuel locally.
The first two are most assuredly false assumptions at a glance, the final one I'm not aware of. I'm not saying your conclusion is right or wrong just that I don't buy we need 100% renewable electricity for EVs to make environmental sense.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16851#tabs_S....
As wind generation expands with falling costs, particularly offshore, that's likely to fall significantly within the lifetime of a vehicle bought today.
Also even if the carbon emissions are the same, there is a large benefit in shifting particulate matter and NOx pollution out of cities.
On top of that, natural gas burns very cleanly compared to gasoline or diesel.
Even if I buy the fact that your EV car is only equally efficient, you are changing distributed pollution of cars which is very difficult to mitigate into point source pollution at the production plant which is far easier to mitigate.
In addition, the moment your car is in stop-and-go traffic at 5mph, electric becomes a huge win. An ICE is probably idling even when not moving (that is changing somewhat in newer cars as they can start and stop the engine quite a bit quicker) while an EV (even hybrid) is effectively dividing by zero when not actually rolling (no consumption at all).
There are a few things in play here:
1. Big power plants are WAY more efficient than wherever tiny thing you have under the hood, I don't care if it is a V8. 2. Power plants are usually located away from population centers. This means less health problems in the population. 3. Once you replace the power plants, the ENTIRE CAR FLEET gets an automatic update. It is easier to replace power plants, than to replace hundreds of millions of cars. 4. Electric car engines are incredibly efficient. 5. All those cars idling in traffic jams are not helping anyone. 6. 30% != 100%. It does not follow that they are all "methane powered". By your own admission, 30% are. 7. You are not burning fuel trying to extract, refine and transport fuels. Electricity transportation is everywhere and doesn't require trucks or pipelines. 8. EVs don't require oil changes. This is another big pollution source that's often not remembered.
Then why not use this money to replace them. If it's so easy then the effects will be felt sooner and will be enjoyed by everyone not just people looking to buy a new car.
Coal plants (the most polluting) are shutting down and being replaced by natural gas, wind and solar simply due to cost of wind and solar dropping rapidly.
Those costs will continue to drop and economics will get even better in the (relatively near) future.
Vox often covers that topic, see e.g. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/19/164944..., https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/4/10/1721444..., https://www.vox.com/2018/5/30/17408602/solar-wind-energy-ren..., https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/5/18/1735973...