Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

> California has been closing more nuclear power plants than it has been opening,

California has brought far more solar/ wind power online over the past 20 years than they've retired nuclear power plants. They are also slowly phasing out non-renewable power. Though the pace isn't as fast as many would like, it's happening.

> To extend off that question, I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time.

For the typical 10,000-20,000 mile/ year driver, an electric car uses less power than it takes to air condition a California home. If you have even a small solar install—which makes tons of sense in California—the load on the grid is near zero.

View on HN

> an electric car uses less power than it takes to air condition a California home.

The recent blackouts demonstrate that California doesn't have enough dispatchable power to support the current air conditioning footprint. We need to add more EVs and more air conditioning on top of that.

It's a fair point, but since cars charge during off-peak hours and during the night when AC shouldn't be needed, which should mitigate the issue.

There will definitely need to be more power generated to support EVs if we're going to eliminate fossil fuel burning.

If we're replacing nuclear with solar, night time energy will no longer be off-peak-time but rather during expensive-battery-storage-time

> If we're replacing nuclear with solar,

Replacing coal/ natural gas burning with solar is the priority by a big margin.

Unless there are safety issues, it makes sense to maintain nuclear plants at least until after any natural gas/ carbon emitting plants are shuttered.

At that point, it's cost/benefit & safety. At the current rate, it sounds like the cost of solar plus storage is likely to be less than nuclear by then regardless so this whole argument will be pointless.

The tiny nuke plants look pretty cool to me though!

Also keep in mind that California now requires solar panels on all new home construction. The supply of renewable power in the state is expanding rapidly - our sources for power are not static.

Funny hitch - they don't require batteries. When the grid goes down you're left without power because your solar system isn't storing locally. Of course, you can add your own battery array, but many people didn't/haven't and have suffered through these blackouts like everyone else connected to the grid.

With the use of efficient lighting, running the AC or electric heat is probably the biggest energy usage for a house. Having solar panels supplying power during the day can help reduce the load on the grid from everyone running their AC. It's more of a benefit to the grid and everyone else to have panels without a battery than it is to your own energy needs.

If the mandate in the article goes through, most people will have a battery capable of powering their home for several days -- it'll just happen to be on wheels.

The car could act as a house battery.

One can run the numbers. Average car drives 12500 miles a year. Is ~35 miles a day. EV's get 3-4 miles a kwh. So what? consume ~12 kwh/day.

That's not much. $2 worth of electricity. And $3-4,000 worth of solar panels will produce that much a day. Compare that to the car that costs ten times as much.

I don't want to talk about what my electric bill was like when I lived in California, and the number of 100+ degree days has gotten worse since we moved out.

> $3-4,000 worth of solar panels

Is this a useful metric in California? In the states where I have lived, the total installed system cost has always been the driver, and the panels typically are only one component of many there.

$3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels.

> $3-$4k sounds reasonable until you realize that you need to spend $25k on top of that to be able to use your $4k of panels.

I doubt it. I installed a ~2.5kW system in CA 4 years ago, and all in it was like $6500 after the tax credits. Panel prices have dropped 16% since then, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if now the same system were around $4k including installation after tax credits.

I failed in that I didn't state my point. The point is the cost of an electric car is say $40,000 and the marginal costs to provide the power for it is $4,000. So the ratio is 10 to 1. One could argue and say it's 5 to 1 and I won't die on that hill.

Good argument that supplying electricity doesn't change the economics much.

It's definitely true that for solar the total system cost is higher, often a lot higher now than the cost of panels. On the other hand the marginal cost of electricity for a power company is lower than residential panels. So I would use that as the cost basis.

Also remember gasoline has a huge infrastructure behind it.

I'm certainly not an expert on this, but wouldn't one need to consider the peak power draw rather than average power draw?

I'm reminded of various articles about toilet flushing during breaks in sports broadcasts, e.g. [0]

[0] http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/90_million_people_flush_to...

The same phenomenon happens in England with power consumption, because everyone turns on their electric teapots at the same time.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-world-england-elec...

Most EVs allow you to schedule charging so your car charges during off-peak hours, usually after midnight. While apparently California has shifted so the ideal time to charge is 10am until 2pm or something like that, during the early morning isn't bad either. Shifting to more solar power and more EVs will likely complicate things.

> If you have even a small solar install—which makes tons of sense in California—the load on the grid is near zero.

Will most people be plugging in their cars during the day, though? Or will they be charging at night, at home?

I haven't looked into stats, but I wouldn't be surprised if most people in California aren't able to charge at home. It would be neat to see incentives for adding charging infrastructure to apartment and other dense living situations

Home charging is the most convenient form of charging, and should be encouraged, but people tend to be home when it's dark and (excluding the pandemic) away when it's sunny, so this doesn't align well with solar generation.

The panels can help reduce total grid usage during the day to help supply power to businesses where people are during the day. A home AC shouldn't be running much during the day if no one is home so that helps with reducing the load. Once it gets dark, the load shifts back to homes where people are charging their cars and running the AC more heavily. I imagine the heaviest load times would be in the evening when solar panels aren't providing much power, the AC is starting to run to cool the house down, and people are starting to plug in their cars. Large power storage systems should be in place to help smooth out these increases in demand.

> The panels can help reduce total grid usage during the day to help supply power to businesses where people are during the day.

Daytime load is basically not a problem in California or elsewhere in the US. In fact, load minus solar is already lower at noon than at midnight. [0] This is referred to as the "duck curve".

As such, load shifting should be the opposite of what you suggest - we should be doing things like cooling houses to 60 degrees during the day so that the AC doesn't have to be run in the evening, encouraging people to charge cars during the day and other things like that.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

> we should be doing things like cooling houses to 60 degrees during the day so that the AC doesn't have to be run in the evening

I'm dubious that this is a good idea. Cooling your house to 60 degrees on a hot day burns a huge amount of power needlessly. The amount of energy loss in a typical house is so big, this is a massive waste. Your assumption seems to be that you can bank power, using air temperature to try and story energy when it's inside a big leaky box is futile.

Keeping the indoor temp at 78 all day and cooling it to 72 around an hour before you get home is going to be far more efficient. If you want to burn power during the day, run your dishwasher and run a timed dryer load. If you want to bank it, buy a battery.

While I know "Zero Emissions" doesn't mean EV but assuming most people end up with one and chargers are ubiquitous (and free) you could use the EVs as grid storage.

There are plenty of people who live in apartments where plugging into the grid at work makes a lot of sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com