America’s Power Grid Isn’t Ready for Electric Cars | Hacker News Reader

America’s Power Grid Isn’t Ready for Electric Cars

citylab.com

20 pointswatchdogtimer20 comments

Citylab.com has published some great articles, but this isn't one of them. It's not clear to me why they published this article or who the intended audience is. And I'm skeptical of the conclusions, given that the article doesn't mention the rise of wind and PV solar power generation coupled with energy storage capacity.

FYI, electric cars can also act as grid energy storage capacity.

Could, in theory, with additional hardware and integration and agreements needed.

Agree. All it says is: if all cars magically turned electrical today, we'd need more electricity.

No discussion of the risks/barriers in place to get more electricity. (By the way, technology and infrastructure investment aren't the bottlenecks here. It would be the perverse politicians and bone-headed bureaucrats at the electric system operators.) Also, no discussion about solutions as you mentioned.

Given I'm in a bad mood, I bet the purpose of the article is simply to get published so the authors can sell their expertise to some regulatory hearing.

I think the writer of the headline was not the writer of the article. A more accurate title "Most states need power grid upgrade for future EV demand".

Agreed that there was a missed opportunity in mentioning the rise of wind/PV/battery.

This piece is an obvious plant by the anti-electric lobby.

The article does not mention the word "battery" in any of its forms ("battery", "batteries") even once. And yet batteries are the proven solution to exactly the problem they are pretending is unsolvable.

Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil refineries.

Almost all of it goes to making “branchy” isomers needed for gasoline, or things like hydro desulfurization. Reduce the demand for gasoline and diesel, and now you have surplus electricity, which so happens to be more per gallon than the equivalent electrical energy in a gge of EV usage.

This isn’t a panacea- if you don’t have refineries in the area, and/or their power can’t be fed to the grid, you might have a problem.

California and Texas are solid, though.

I tried looking, and couldn't find anywhere close to a source that says that refining gasoline consumes so much electricity you'd get more mileage using it to power a BEV. Do you have something

This page, although a bit sloppy maybe, has a lot of referenced links in it that should help you find what you're looking for:

https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/gasol...

Yeah, that was one place I looked. But the only credible linked calculation had it at 0.2, not 6.

The others seem to conflate energy with electricity consumption (it doesn't at all surprise me that the process uses a lot of energy, just the supposed electrical consumption).

Further, the back of the napkin just doesn't work out. The US refines 18.5 million barrels a day (for 2012 from WP), or 283 billion gallons a year. This implies 1698 billion kWh of consumption out of 4015 billion kWh total electrical production, or more than the total which is used by industry (one third).

You seemed to know what you were talking about which is why I asked for a source... I have a very hard time believing it's even within an order of magnitude of the correct figure.

Although I'm finding it hard to find confirmation (or denial), I believe refineries have captive power plants as part of their operations, which are effectively isolated from the grid, and kept out of aggregate electricity generation statistics (they always seem to call it "net electricity" for some reason and maybe this is part of why).

But those captive power plants would have to add up to be a third of the capacity of the power plants on the main grid - that's a huge amount.

If the process uses a lot of heat, and you're why wouldn't you just skip the electricity generation and use the thermal energy directly? So presumably the electrical consumption to the extent it exists is for a more sophisticated use than that.

I would suggest (in the absence of other evidence) the government report linked above is correct - that it's relatively efficient in terms of electricity consumption, but not in terms of overall energy consumption.

Check out http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-salazar.pdf

Texas has 2GW of refinery cogen capacity alone.

According to the numbers in that document, that's equivalent to 0.46 kWh per gallon. It also notes:

"The comparison of both graphics suggests that refineries in Texas have excess capacity in many cases"

Compared to a "typical requirement". The slope of the line for "typical requirement" is 0.22 kWh per gallon. This either means Texan refineries are atypically inefficient, or they sell power back to the grid or shut down their power plants.

Either way, we're still an order of magnitude away from the 6 kWh/gallon figure, and from sources that look fairly credible.

Fair enough.

I do know that extraction and pipelines also require prodigious amounts of power. Obviously not so much that it’s uneconomical, but seeing the electric bill for one oil well in the Permian was eye-opening, particularly at the 3c/kWh rate they somehow got. It’d be nice to know the range for different kinds of oil wells. Maybe that’s the source of the electrical use.

Thanks to decades of stalling-off and fossil-fueled obstructive lobbying, so far we've largely failed to build anywhere-near-adequate de-centralized and alternative energy sources.

Originally the fossilers hoped to keep viable alternatives out of the public eye. Now that that's failed, they've got paid foolers running around.

Rome's burning. Nobody wants to make the small sacrifices, nobody wants to think about the Big Sacrifice. So it goes.

It is pretty average that they didn't discuss the fact that the peaking power plants are very expensive, typically burning higher grade fuels like natural gas or diesel, rather than goal or nuclear. And, rather than encourage old style night time off-peak use, we need charging to occur during solar PV peak on colder days, and cars (mobile batteries) to supply to the grid during peak summer load, providing grid stabilisation to account for wind/PV variability.

What if, as seems quite certain, much of the electricity is supplied from off the grid by solar energy at homes, work places, shopping malls, and so on?

It seems the me the article was designed to make the problem look more difficult than it really is, as a way of undermining the adoption of EV's.

All that oil not used in cars could be used to power charging stations...

obviously bollocks

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