Electric cars are coming fast – is the nation’s grid up to it?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Many utilities already offer off peak rates generally. My utility offers incentives to install an EV charger which is networked and then gives you a rebate for charging overnight after 11pm. My EV charging is barely 30% of my wintertime electric use, driving 500-800 mi/month. This is in a home with oil heat. In summertime using AC in the home, my EV usage will shrink as a percent of usage.
Current solar prices keep dropping and incentives are pretty big there as well, so if you are a big EV driver you could put up some solar with a pretty quick break even of ~4 years or so. Finance it correctly and you won’t have any increase in your monthly outlays.
Biggest barrier right now is simply EV cost. I love my car but EVs are still only barely price competitive after incentives/gas savings if you are a small/midsize sedan shopper. If you need something larger like a CUV/SUV/Van/Truck, EVs are only price competitive with a luxury brand/vehicle in the class.
We really need, in California at least, to ramp up workplace charging, otherwise we’re going to have a lot of unused solar :-/.
As part of the same topic, I think we’re going to see PV-covered EV cars in the not too distant future; not because they don’t need charging (they’re about 10% of your instant needs on the move), but because adding PV reduces the pressure on the grid, and will significantly reduce the need to install power lines to sunlit car parks.
Home, multi-storey, and hotel/motel parking will still almost certainly still need power.
Are they? Does that include the manufacturing process?
Here is a quite comprehensive analysis:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0488-7.epdf
Edit: you might have better luck with this link;
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0488-7.epdf?refer...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
I do like your emphasis on marginal effects. As renewables and BEVs grow it will be a balancing act to pick the most marginally effective resources for emissions abatement. California may soon reach a point where an additional dollar invested in solar doesn't abate as much CO2 as the same dollar invested in transmission, storage, or wind -- even if solar has the lowest instantaneous generation cost.
Is this generally true, or does it depend on geography (e.g. being near the coast)? Where I am in the midwest, it seems that the air normally gets very calm after sunset.
"The Relationship between Wind Generation and Balancing-Energy Market Prices in ERCOT: 2007–2009"
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/49415.pdf
See Figure 5. Hourly generation reaches a minimum from about 1:00 to 5:00 PM and reaches its maximum around 1:00 AM.
Offshore wind output changes less from short term day-night cycles, and generally achieves a higher capacity factor. It is also more expensive to build than onshore wind and no large projects have yet been built for the US, though several are on the drawing board.
Example calculation: https://uploads.volkswagen-newsroom.com/system/production/up...
With current efficiency PV systems, the math requires a fairly large surface like the entire flatbed of a Cybertruck to actually generate a meaningful charge.
This also requires the vehicle be parked somewhere its going to get a good amount of sun, excluding parking garages, a lot of urban areas, etc.
Model 3 is about 5m by 2m, and is apparently rated for 241 Wh/mile
4m * 2m * 1kw/m^2 * 50% * 20% = average power 800 W
(50% because the panels are flat, 20% because cell efficiency)
241 Wh/mile * 60 miles/day = average usage 602 W
I’m not sure what fraction of the day people drive for given that I’m not a driver, but I’m eyeballing 5-10%. I acknowledge professional drivers — taxis etc. — can’t possibly rely on PV alone, that PV can only supply a fraction of what they need (my 10% guesstimate), but I still think this should help with the general public. Or are my assumptions way off?
Further answer - The consensus from people who know this better than you & I, have these cars, and in some cases have tried.. is basically - it won’t charge much, and it’s way more expensive than the electricity it is going to generate.
Note there are AC-DC inverter losses of 10-20%. plus input->battery charge losses which are non-linear and very bad at the low end. For example a Tesla won’t even take a charge if the input is below the ~300-500W range in good weather. In cold weather say Northeast US winter, the floor is closer to a 1kW input as there is a heating system to get the battery put to temperature for charging that is going to eat almost all of that.
https://forums.tesla.com/discussion/93521/solar-panels-on-th...
https://forums.tesla.com/discussion/150998/charge-tesla-w-so...
(Or, equivalently, multiply the power from the PV by time to get daily energy output).
The “won’t take a charge below 1 kW” is definitely a killer, if it’s a limit of the batteries themselves and not the charging circuit logic.
4m length * 2m width * 1kw/m^2 insolation * 50% loss due to the panel area being calculated by ground area and it not tracking the sun and therefore not getting peak output * 20% cell efficiency = average power 800 W
My BOTE calculation above should use 25% instead of 50% for day-night average of PV panels horizontal to the ground. Can’t edit now, though. 25% is the planet-wide average for day-night and seasonal variation because that’s the ratio of the surface area of the Earth to the area of a disk intersecting the same flux of sunlight at 1AU (4πr^2 : πr^2).
With that correction, that’s 400 watts average over 24 hours (as in: no not merely the peak at noon); which means 24 h * 400 W = 9.6 kWh per day.
If you drive 60 miles per day, and each mile consumes 241 Wh of energy, then you consume 14.41 kWh of energy per day.
2) In good weather you are probably looking at post-inverter input to charger at 700W, with charger losses meaning about 400-500W making it to the battery. So that is, in an efficient Tesla about 2 miles of range for every hour of peak sun. Depending on your location, orientation and time of year you might expect peak sun hours of 3-6 hours/day. So grand total 6-18mi/day of range added making a lot of happy assumptions and not moving your car during lunch. This amount of charge per day could be acquired in 1-2 minutes at a supercharger and worth about 30-75cents. Or charge at a L2 charger in your own garage in 12-36 minutes.
But this is about what I expect soon-ish, and “soon-ish” both continues the cost decline of PV (including thin flexible panels that would make them suitable for more than just the Cybertruck), and also makes it likely that every roof suitable for PV will already have it (because exponential growth).
I'm guessing you'll get no more than 400W of power on-car solar. I'm guessing 1-2 rooftop panels with a sub-optimal angel.
A Model 3 uses 0.24 hWh per mile.
That's 13 miles of range from baking in the sun for 8 hours? Best case?
They're already popping up in the development stage [0]. 12 km/hr peak solar charging sounds really quite good, and I like the overall design. The company was founded by students who won the World Solar Challenge [1] in 2015, it's pretty neat to see them taking that experience and running with it.
There is also the cost savings in scaling. The cost for a solar system comes down even more when a business can install a whole row of solar panel covered parking, either offer EV charging as a perk or charge for charging, and use the rest of the electricity to power normal electric operations. For the driver, buying the electricity as needed from home or work panels would always be cheaper per total watt usage than buying in-car roof panels, since again, the specialty nature of them means they will always be more expensive and less efficient than their stationary mounted counterparts. You can never scale up car roof solar because you can never install move than one car roof’s worth at a time. You also can’t ignore the inverter power loss that is much worse at the lower power a car roof system would have.
Then of course you have the downsides of long term sun damage to your vehicle to get that minimal charge, instead of protected under a solar panel covered parking or in a garage with solar mounted on top. You have the higher rate of damage by being installed on a moving vehicle instead of a stationary object on a building or parking structure roof. You have the lower rate of return, since panels are rated for 20-25 plus years and most vehicles don’t stay on the road that long. You have the downside of sub optimal charging angle and all the time the vehicle spends in a parking garage during the day, as opposed to a stationary panel that is pointed at the sun 365 days a year. At the end of the day, it will always be cheaper and more efficient to have stationary solar panels.
Given that most people charge their EVs overnight/during work anyway, car roof panels would only really provide value during “road trip” situations, where you are driving close to or beyond at full charge per day. Since you are only getting at best 10-15 additional miles over an entire day in the sun (and more realistically less than 10), it would do very little to reduce range anxiety. And that is not even calculating how much the additional weight of the panels would reduce range.
It sounds good on paper but it is highly unlikely to translate to a real world benefit.
Remember that hydro power doesn’t care about time of day and wind is often able to generate more overnight than during the day.
Further time of use rates can be tweaked as usage & generation requires. Maybe with a lot of EVs in the future & solar installed we encourage people to charge mid-day at work or sunrise->commute start & commute end->sundown, this doesn’t work great in winter but also electric use is lower in winter so maybe it nets out.
You also need to worry about fleet vehicles charging, and other uses. So the off-peak capacity isn't always possible.
Yea that's their commute - what about soccer practice, the gym, the store, visiting grandma, etc. It's unrealistic to say "welp 32 a day we're good."
No it doesn’t?
Most charging can be done at night when power is both cheap and plentiful. The fact that only 5% of people work third shift is testament to this!
No one is pretending that ALL charging is at off-peak hours. But the fact is that not only can most charging be off-peak much of it will be. This is excellent news you should be happy about!
Is this true if you also consider maintenance? EVs require much less maintenance - no oil changes, filters, no cooling system, no fuel system and associated pumps. Much less time wasted to service those things.
Sure, the costs are higher up-front for an EV but cost of ownership over the lifetime of the vehicle are much lower.
Pretty fucked up that you only check for air pollution and not actual road-worthiness.
Here all Teslas had an inspection failure rate after of 10.8% (61,000 km driven on average) in 2019 after three years of driving, which is quite bad. For comparison, Mercedes-Benz E-Class and BMW 5-series both had 7.1% (108,000 km and 91,000 km driven on average). This suggests to me that Tesla owners should really spend more time queuing at the shop and at an inspection center.
Sure the fine print in the manual says there's a service schedule, but the pop culture trope says otherwise.
Pretty fucked up that some states waste everyone's time and money checking for actual road worthiness when that's basically a rounding error compared to all the other sources of danger on the roads.
IMO this is one of the few things CA does right. Obviously CARB is a corrupt money grab shithshow but the idea that you don't really care what people do so long as the cars aren't belching pollution is well thought out.
I get that not seeing shitboxes with rusty fenders makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside but mechanical failure simply isn't a common source of accidents compared to everything else and inspection programs can only do so much to address it.
You might think I must live in a sketchy area to encounter such people. Well no. One was a specialist doctor at Stanford hospital and the other worked at Apple. But they both lied. My car defended me from severe financial costs these people could have inflicted on me. Thousands of dollars if you add up the two cases. And that’s in just a couple years of ownership. Both were caught on video and were held responsible despite their lies.
Of course it might seem that having cameras has nothing to do with being an EV. But some EVs do have a lot of cameras, and that’s part of the cost people complain about, but it’s also part of how the car has much lower total cost of ownership. It should be factored in when making cost comparisons, just like the lower maintenance costs you point out.
The way it does have to do with the car being an EV is that these cameras are backed by a massive battery, so they can be always on. ICE cars can’t come even close to doing that.
A typical four-camera 360° setup probably draws about 5-10 watts, more if it's performing motion-detection on the images. You'd be unwise to run that overnight on a typical starter battery, especially in winter. But it's a drop in the bucket for an EV.
(Personally I think this is an egregious amount of "vampire power" to waste if nothing's going on, but apparently a lot of things are going on.)
You must have been upper middle class for either too long or not long enough to not thing upper middle class folks can be sketchy as hell :-).
> Of course it might seem that having cameras has nothing to do with being an EV. But some EVs do have a lot of cameras, and that’s part of the cost people complain about, but it’s also part of how the car has much lower total cost of ownership. It should be factored in when making cost comparisons, just like the lower maintenance costs you point out.
Yeah, you can have a dashcam in any car ?
But seriously, a street recording is not forbidden in many countries, right?
Maybe because they have been so privileged throughout their life that they feel entitled to not taking responsibility
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/aracheology-wealth-in...
They also had wealth inequality. Sometimes, it resulted in the poor and wealthy fighting. This fighting was often very brutal with each side putting the other to death. Once in awhile, an enlightened leader would come who would put into place a system for greater prosperity for all.
Our society should stop feeding children lies about systemic inclusivity.
Children are fed lies about their role in this society and spend a lifetime acting surprised that their ideas never happen. We could also just stop doing that. Its not corrupt that we don't have a direct democracy, we just dont have a direct democracy. And the system we do have has different rules, which simply don't include the capability of “the proletariat” to have the same effect as immortal organizations with enough resources to maintain focus.
There are several ways to look at inequality. The most simplistic way to so do is looking at relative wealthy by decile and comparing the ratio between the top and bottom. In feudal society, everybody was relatively poor, and the wealth gap may be on the order of 10-100X. In modern times, that ratio may be far larger and under a certain definition that would be mean higher inequality. I'll concede that this approach fails to capture the practical experience of the haves and have-nots over time, and having our's hit all-time highs isn't immoral if there is some baseline of sufficiency at the bottom. It also doesn't account for social mobility, which we exceptional at.
Still, we live in a novel time where orders of magnitude of wealth that haven't existed before. It is hard to fathom, and calls into question what is and isn't a de-facto privilege of enjoying.
I found this article which offers some more nuanced approaches to measuring inequality in different societies than Gini. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/5388/1/MPRA_paper_5388.pdf
However this is not based on reality, the US ranks behind most European countries and canada on social mobility: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
The visual capitalist provides a definition of social mobility - children having a better life than their parents or being unconstrained by their socio-economic status. But the index they reference doesn't measure that. It measures more general Quality of Life metrics like prevalence of malnourishment or quality of the social safety net.
So while a high score reflects an easier life for the low end of the social ladder it doesn't actually measure their ability to move up it. I could on paper come up with a country that scored quite well on most of the index measures and had a rigid caste system where children could never outperform their parents and cannot escape their birth status.
The practical issue I'm concerned with is around the ability of a minority of people to afford 6-8 figure legal and PR bills and avoid accountability for all manner of issues. When you can tie up courts for years to play financial triage and get the best reputation money can buy, you aren't likely to be held accountable.
I know a person who drove their car into a wall while drunk and high in college. Their parents paid $5000 to an attorney and their DUI charge was eventually dropped. Another friend's life took a different course when they got their DUI under similar circumstances but without an attorney, and despite their earnest efforts it's been hard to overcome within the job market.
I'm arguing that the defacto disparity of legal budgets is quite damaging to the fabric that holds our society together, which is equal treatment under blind justice. It means an equal distribution of dishonesty is punished disproportionately according to familial wealth.
I think you'll find this definition of privilege quite in line with OP's meaning: https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Priviledge >A particular benefit, advantage, or Immunity enjoyed by a person or class of people that is not shared with others. A power of exemption against or beyond the law. It is not a right but, rather, exempts one from the performance of a duty, obligation, or liability.
Paul Piff had some findings that rich people are more likely to break rules to get ahead for example (he has a nice Ted talk btw). However, more recent research found that this is largely/likely due to wealth but being "primed" to think about money, i.e. if you think about money your less likely to help other etc..
Here's a BBC article that summarises the research quite well https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31761576
How about eight cameras covering pretty much all angles, that are always on, even when parked?
Definitely seems higher. I just checked the price for insuring a 2019 Mercedes-Benz E-Class (hybrid). It was 1350 €/year or 2100 €/year if I choose the premium coverage options. For a 2019 Tesla Model 3, the same prices were 2030 €/year and 2670 €/year.
2019 Tesla Model S was even worse at 2400 €/year and 3260 €/year. Model S is definitely more expensive than an E-Class, so I also compared to a 2019 Mercedes-Benz S-Class (hybrid), which was about 16,000 € more expensive to buy than the Model S. Got 1920 €/year and 3060 €/year.
(Premium coverage options were parking coverage, glass insurance, better write-off compensation and temp car coverage.)
They do take the safety features into account, but notice I said “adequately.”
Whether Elon actually said it or not, I think it’s a good hypothesis.
It could also be that Tesla is just willing to take a smaller profit out of the business, relative to others.
Why is Tesla able to undercut them with their own insurance product?
I got a new Volvo XC60 T8 last year(400bhp, £60k car), my fully comprehensive insurance as a 29 year old is...£400 a year. With their highest tier premium insurance option, with premium courtesy car, full EU cover, glass cover, full legal cover, 20 million euro liability cover....etc, full package basically.
Before that I had a Mercedes GLA45 AMG and my insurance was marginally more expensive, like £500 a year.
I can't believe any of the cars you listed would be more to insure than these two....so what gives? Why is it so expensive?
Granted, the online prices usually suck compared to what you can get once you call (or get called by) an agent. If I tried buying my current insurance for my car it's giving me 1100 €/year whereas my actual price is 940 €/year.
A 2015 Mercedes-Benz GLA45 (49,000 €) would cost me 1380 €/year or 2040 €/year with all bells and whistles.
I understand paying for mandatory liability insurance, since you might hit a Bugatti Veyron and do damage far surpassing your net worth. But I have no idea why would someone pay 10% of the vehicle cost per year to cover repairs to their own vehicle due to their own driving mistakes. How about... they drive a cheaper vehicle until they learn how to drive?
>How about... they drive a cheaper vehicle until they learn how to drive?
I have insurance against fire, theft, vandalism and parking lot damage. Please do tell me how your awesome driving skills prevent these sorts of damage.
I'd also very much like to know how you live your life if you have the money to pay for your car to be repaired out of pocket in case of fire, theft or having a moose come through your windshield.
Insurance companies make money by overpricing the actual risk. And they make a LOT of money. The expected value of an insurance contract is negative to the buyer. Coverage of tail risk (e.g. millions in liability), makes sense since you don't want to get bankrupted, but when there's a capped risk you can tolerate (e.g. value of car), avoiding the insurance statistically saves you money. Insurance companies pay their actuaries very well to guarantee this.
Plus, not having to deal with insurance companies makes car repair so much less stressful in my experience...
The capped instantaneous risk lets you go for the option with highest expected value without having some chance you'll get instantly bankrupted.
Presumably in this scenario you actually require a car. That said, insuring it will cover you for any number of losses in the year, whereas setting aside an amount of savings equal to the value of the car will cover you for only one loss.
You can't just be chasing the positive EV when the variance is potentially large. For example, if Warren Buffet offered to flip a coin with you for your net worth, plus $100 bonus if you win, the expected value is very slightly positive but I believe you'd be unwise to take bet that unless your current net worth was very low already.
This is the most precise way to phrase the original recommendation. Don't get insurance for things that are easy for you tolerate the variance on. That can be true if you buy a cheap car and are pretty well off. What's the actual chance your car gets stolen 3 times in a year? After the first 2 times maybe you could change the place you store your car, get a GPS tracker or something?
There were 6858 vehicles stolen in NYC in 2020 (nearly doubled 2019) [0]. There are roughly 2M cars registered in NYC [1]. That's a 1 in 300 yearly chance to have your car stolen at least once. If we assume events are uncorrelated, there's a 1 in 100000 chance of two or more thefts, and a 1 in 25000000 chance of three or more. The odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident in the next year is something like 1 in 8000 [2].
That aside, there's all sorts of optional coverage that most people definitely can tolerate the variance on without calculation.
> You can't just be chasing the positive EV when the variance is potentially large.
There are many investment strategies that are exactly this. Writing options is one example. Forgoing insurance, like option writing, isn't possible without sufficient collateral of your own. I recognize that this is not possible for everyone. There are some cheap cars that work fine though. The biggest takeaway is to second guess the sales pitch on premium insurance plans.
Your example is another instant bankruptcy case, with reward that doesn't come close to compensating the risk.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/nyregion/car-thefts-nyc.h... [1]: https://dmv.ny.gov/statistic/2018reginforce-web.pdf [2]: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...
There is a long list for sure - but they are all very unlikely. The risk of having your car stolen can be mitigated with a 50$ GPS transmitter. Fire? What year is this, cars still spontaneously combust, or maybe do you live on an active volcano? A moose going though your window sounds like a life and death situation, having your car totaled and walking away safe and sound would be glorious.
If you were to purchase insurance for such risks, it would be negligible compared to the major source of insurance claims, trafic accidents. So you are are either paying for other's people accidents, and it makes no sense to continue to do so, or you are actually getting a positive value out of it because you are a bad driver, case in which it makes sense to try to improve your driving, while keeping the insurance.
My most expensive repair was in a parking lot where someone scraped and dented the entire side of my car trying to get into a space they really should not have. I'm under the impression most damage to cars happens in parking lots or street parking.
Still, as I wrote above, I still agree that insurance for the car isn't worth it, even though at some points it would have had positive value for me. In the long run it statistically won't.
If you have such proofs and credibly convey the message that you know the law and are willing to sue, then all damage becomes fixable on someone else's insurance and you pay only normal wear and tear on your vehicle. In 200.000 Km, I only had a single fender bender that was my fault, around 200€ in damage - while insurance would have costed me in the 5000-10000€ range for the same period. Since I am an aggressive (within the limits of the law) driver, I was involved in a dozen or so minor accidents.
The amount of mandatory liability coverage in most jurisdictions will be a rounding error to totalling a Veyron. E.g., in California the mandatory property damage coverage is $5,000, while the value of the Veyron is about $2 million. So, with mandatory liability coverage your still out of pocket, well, essentially $2 million.
Generally true of mass produced cars, very often not true of small production run, high-priced supercars, which often do the opposite.
Including Veyron:
https://www.hotcars.com/bugatti-veyron-has-actually-increase...
But, even @ $300K instead of $2-3 Million, that’s still a huge multiple of the mandatory liability coverage in most jurisdictions, so carrying only the mandatory minimum wouldn’t do much for you if you cause one to be totalled.
https://www.bugatti.com/media/news/2019/bugatti-classic-cars...
Trying to apply the same logic to a rare car of which there were under 500 units produced and even less now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NJmB1F2mdE) as you do to your economy car is just wrong.
Frankly, I don't believe it's "fair" for somebody to be exposing everyone around them to such financial risk. IMHO if you purchase a 2m vehicle and drive it around on public roads, you need the insurance to close the gap between avg/state mandated coverage and what your losses might be. The laws should prob reflect that and limit the average consumers liability.
Where I am, you make a police report, and they determine who (legally) is at fault.
Tangentially related, I also recommend a good offsite backup scheme (costs a little, but well worth it) versus "taking care of your devices/drives".
I’m still trying to figure out why EV owners rationalize the inclusion of basic consumer electronics to somehow add thousands upon thousands of dollars to the price
I have never bought a car with less than 100k miles on it and I drive pretty nice cars. There are a whole lot of ice cars on the road with more than 100k miles because the last decade has produced very reliable ice vehicles with very replaceable parts.
https://insideevs.com/news/429818/tesla-model-s-x-battery-ca...
I'm pretty sure that's me, but take everything I say with a grain of salt.
>Right now the resale is quite good on EVs, but I don’t know if that’s attributable to the novelty of EVs or some other factor that won’t last ten years.
IMO it's because 1) the majority of EVs were produced recently (not surprising when the scale of production is increasing exponentially), plus 2) there's generally a lack of cheap ICE-comparable EV options to suck demand away from the used EV market.
Predicting the prices of used cars in 2030 is inherently a little political, so excuse me if I step on toes here.
EVs will be at price-parity with ICE cars by 2024 and will utterly crush them by 2030. As ICE cars are replaced by EVs, things could go one of two main ways:
1) the massive existing supply of ICE cars, plus the massive drop in petrol usage due to EV replacing ICE cars, will mean that second-hand ICE cars and petrol drop massively in price for a while. This causes people to reconsider their EV purchases and a stalling of EV adoption until the ICE-car surplus drains away. This keeps the ICE car infrastructure around for longer than otherwise.
2) (the political bit) ICE cars currently have a certain political protection due to their ubiquity - politicians are often unwilling to raise taxes on cars or petrol, even if it's warranted due to e.g. air pollution or climate destabilisation. A high enough popularity of EVs (e.g. once 30% of cars on the road are EVs) could change the political scene, resulting in a surge in support for getting rid of ICE cars entirely - people are encouraged to have their ICE cars junked in exchange for whatever incentives, and petrol doesn't drop enough to be a complete bargain. ICE cars are relatively rare and people aren't confident in their future, so they keep dropping. The faster they drop, the less political resistance to simply banning them outright. Eventually ICE cars are dead, or as good as.
That said, there are a TON of different factors that are hard to predict the impact of. For example:
* Regardless of scenario, the drop in ICE cars will reduce the revenue of petrol stations, resulting in more of them closing. Fewer petrol stations will exacerbate the switch to EVs, just like the rollout of superchargers and workplace/on-street chargers. It's entirely possible that once we hit e.g. 50% EVs, there's simply no money in petrol stations and several stations have to shut down, causing a feedback loop of fuel stations being less convenient and more expensive, encouraging more EV adoption.
* If petrol stations start closing then there might be a switch to buying fuel deliveries online, which will (IMO) likely result in 'boutique fuels' and customisation. I have no idea what effects that will have, honestly. Either way, the main reason I think this is viable is because this isn't new; when cars were first invented, petrol stations didn't exist and people bought their fuel at the local chemist in cans/bottles.
* It's unclear how far hydrogen will go, but if hydrogen vehicles are common then they may keep petrol stations around for longer than otherwise, as hydrogen stations will likely also be petrol stations. AFAICT Hydrogen vehicles will primarily be trucks, as basically nobody else needs the range that hydrogen offers and hydrogen requires far more up-front infrastructure investment, which requires scale.
* If EVs truly require less maintenance, then we might see a lot of mechanics out of jobs, and as a result we could see lower maintenance costs, making ICE cars comparably more appealing after the initial EV boom but before the surplus mechanics retrain and move into different sectors.
* There may be short-term resource squeezes on EV production - for instance, IIRC lithium mining takes ~7 years to set up a new mine (likely far less to scale up existing mines, mind you) and when you're scaling up exponentially, a small underestimation today will result in a large shortage in 7 years. A stalling of battery production could result in a spike of EV prices, which would encourage a second wind for ICE cars.
* Places that import a ton of energy, like Japan and Korea, might be sticking to fuel cars for a while longer than places with cheaper electricity. In particular, if Japan ever imports a ton of hydrogen, then directly fueling hydrogen cars would make far more sense than Battery EVs charged from a hydrogen-powered grid. If they adopt Hydrogen EVs, then that keeps the R&D ticking along to keep hydrogen in the game elsewhere.
* The politics for ICE cars are heavily tied to the climate - if there's any major political seachange for climate action, well, the reality on that is that ICE cars have zero future and need to be gotten rid of ASAP. So unified demand for a step-change on climate = ICE cars are flat-out dead by 2030.
I also expect that used ICE cars in developed world would be exported more (especially not well aged cars) to developing world.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/15/climate/elect...
For me, at least, the price of petrol is about 2.5 what the default is and the default yearly distance driven is at least twice what I would do .
As far as I can tell the vehicle sticker prices in the US are about 0.6 to 0.8 what they would be here but you can't change that within the model anyway.
Note that there are a lot of myths drving up costs for no reason. A 3000 mile oil change isn't a treat for your engine. In some tests the least engine wear was 8000 miles on the oil. Changing the oil early lets a bit of dust in so is not a good thing if the oil is good. (Synthetic oil is a treat, but the car will be fine without)
Are suggesting that people shouldn't keep cars beyond 5 years or 100k miles?
The Corolla is a very simple car in every respect and inexpensive. Reliability goes down when systems get more complicated and expensive. That's why the Acura and Lexus equivalents of there Honda and Toyota counterparts are much less reliable.
Mazda was never in the running. Mitsubishi has better ratings than them.
Modern cars will generally last at least 300k miles today with few problems. When the finally die it is because the body is shot - something that has nothing to do with the power train. (I live in an area where winter means a lot of salt on the roads, my friends in warmer areas report cars lasting even longer).
Of course I probably shouldn't say this. People like you who trade in their almost new cars all the time because they are afraid they are a money pit keep people like me in nice cars for not much money.
That's not been my experience. I was a Honda loyalist and my first 4 cars were all Hondas and the reliability steadily decreased over the years. My first car, an 88, only ever needed regular maintenance and an alternator at 250k miles. My last Honda, an 07, was costing $2500 a year in maintenance when I got rid of it with 127k miles in 2015.
The three most reliable automobile manufacturers according to Consumer Reports Reliability Indexes, by a large margin, are Toyota, Honda, and Subaru.
Electric motors and fixed gears can go 25,000 to 50,000 hours before they need a rebuild. And they can be rebuilt multiple times. And the industry is talking about EV batteries that will last a million miles.
Factor that into the capital cost of owning an EV and it changes everything.
Now consider that the usual finance term for car is about a third it's expected life. Typical car lasts 15 years, typical finance is 5 years. If an EV's expected life is 30 years, vs 15 above. Then the reasonable finance term can double to 10 years.
There are anecdotes of displays costing $7k, and designed for planned obsolescence after 5-7 years. Ironically, this is the same timeframe where the car depreciation makes a stronger case for buying a new vehicle rather than paying that kind of money on fixing an older one. Point being, I don’t think we can plan on a 30 year EV life anymore than we can count on using the same personal computer for decades.
The big three tried that in the 1970's.
I have a thoery why it doesn't work. It's because resale value matters. Price out how much people are willing to pay for a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. Now look at the price of a used sprinter with a 150k miles on it vs a random Ford or Dodge van. It's about $20k vs under $10k
Companies that play the planned obsolesce game with EV's are going to find themselves in a quality vs price corner coffin. Because customers rightly perceive the companies cars as shoddy. The company can't charge enough to build quality cars. They get stuck just the way GM did 40 years ago. And is still stuck today.
I don’t think the Sprinter vs Transit example is a very illustrative one. Personally, I’d rather have a used Ford or Dodge simply because the life cycle cost of a Sprinter is insane where I live due to maintenance costs. They have similar base prices new but with any features the Sprinter quickly outpaces (ha) a similar American van in initial cost as well. I don’t think they are apples to apples.
It didn’t work for the Big Three because at the time, Japanese were trying to differentiate themselves and they did it on the quality front. I tend to think it was more about complacency than planned obsolescence.
I think people generally look at mechanical and electronics very differently. People often look at simplicity in mechanical designs as a feature, where I think the opposite is true in electronics. I’m skeptical that people will be buying EVs expecting to drive the same one for 30 years, but we’ll see.
I'll take this as a non answer then.
That seems to go against what I know about basic accounting.
You have parts in an ICE vehicle that can last 30 years or longer. But the reliability of your vehicle is the totality of the overall reliability. The drivetrain is a major constituent so obviously iimproving reliability will increase the overall design life. But it won’t bring the other components up to the same. For example, my last car was replaced because the suspension was rotting from harsh winters. The drivetrain was still perfect, but it didn’t make sense to maintain/keep it considering the depreciated value of the car.
Besides that, many people look at cars as a status symbol rather than strictly on utilitarian means. I doubt many people will keep their EVs long, just like most don’t keep their perfectly working cell phones for a decade. The current stock price of TSLA seems to indicate most don’t think the market will shrink this much
So for me imagining going from 20 year year old cars to 30 year old ones is not a stretch. Where for you it's going from 5 years to 30.
I’ve worked as a controls engineer at an automotive assembly plant side-by-side with quality engineers. I’ve also worked as a reliability engineer.
Methinks you make too many assumptions :-)
Oil changes and filters are reasonably cheap, i guess $50 every 5-10k miles?
I would really want to see long term cost of ownership of ev once you include replacement battery.
Edit: of course the repairs add up as the car gets older for ic (because of things you mention), but i wonder how does that stack against battery itself.
Proper way to think of battery life is depreciation per mile. If a battery costs $8000 and lasts 200,000 miles, that's 4 cents a mile. If it only last 150,000 miles that's still only 5.3 cents/mile.
Yes, I think you’re vastly overestimating how much these things cost. A $15k car might need a $100/year in oil changes, and then like $500 in service every $30k miles or so. The most expensive part is probably replacing tires, which is common to the electric car as well.
All of the maintenance on ICE cars gets bad in that 120k miles+ range. But at that point you’ve had to replace the battery on your Tesla, which almost buys you another new $15k car.
Also its more than just oil that electric cars don't need replaaced. Electric cars don't have transmissions and rarely ever use the brakes two more leading causes of both regular maintenance and costly repairs of ICE cars.
[0] https://www.thebalance.com/average-car-maintenance-cost-4775...
That seems massively excessive oil changing for your mileage.
Fun fact - the same car manufacturers tell British people to change their oil every 21k miles or 24 months, and tell American people to change their oil every 3k miles or 6 months. For literally the same car, being driven in potentially identical conditions.
Americans are just changing their oil needlessly! And they have a whole industry of ‘oil change shops’ you don’t get in many other countries to do the needless work! Bonkers!
I do happily ignore the oil change shop stickers that say it should be changed in 3 months/5000km.
1k a year is absolutely insane. That must scale up with expensive cars. A new battery, new brake pads, and and windshield wipers don’t even come near 1k and you don’t even have to replace any of those annually.
This isn't true. Typically after 100k miles Teslas lose about 5-10% capacity. I suppose if you are bumping into that limit a lot, it might be a problem, but it would make far more sense to sell your current car and buy a new one at that point. You could get decent resale value out of it because lots of people would be perfectly happy with a Tesla with a 280 mile range versus 310 miles.
There are Teslas out there that have clocked over 300k miles and still have more than 70% of their rated range. Again, even if the current owner has an issue with ~200 miles range, selling a Tesla with a 200 mile range won't be a big problem.
While EVs are unarguably simpler, the gas cars do have 100+ years of effort into making them reliable. Gas cars today (and even back into the 90s) are so extremely reliable that basically no drivetrain work at all is needed well into the 200K mile range unless you get unlucky with a lemon.
The things that do tend to generate repair work are shared between the platforms. Electronics & wiring, controls, seats, power windows are in my experience the worst offenders. EVs have all that.
Our Fiat 500e's (two) have spent a lot more days in the dealer shop than any of my gas cars ever, FWIW.
It is kind of nice to not have to worry about oil changes! But a ~$50 oil change twice a year won't ever make up for the large cost difference of an EV.
So purely from a cost perspective (not talking about climate impact!), the EVs are not cheaper to own.
If you keep your car for longer, an EV will require less expenses for moving parts, but it might offset this by requiring a new battery after 8-12 years (right now, batteries retail for $12k and more, let’s hope this goes down soon).
Given that, fuel savings are really great. With my old ICE car a round trip to the big city cost €10, while with my Ioniq it’s only €3 in summer, when charged at home (even though we pay €0.20/kWh). Maybe €4.50 in winter. So on average we’re looking at something like 60% savings in fuel costs even with our expensive middle european electricity plans.
FWIW I just had my 2018 leaf inspected and at 22K miles they said the brakes looked good.
VW uses drum brakes for that reason now, at least for the ID3. Those don’t really rust AFAIK.
At least here in California it seems like the toughest times for the grid currently are around 7-9pm when they do the solar to fossil fuel transition (wind can be sporadic). I imagine that'll coincide with when a lot of cars are charging so hopefully we're able to step up our energy storage capacity
I live in the PNW, hydro is fairly flexible so we don’t get off peak discounts. California uses a lot of hydro also, I suspect they are using more of that rather than coal to fill in the gaps between solar
Hydro is a pretty small part of our grid (real-time and historical data here: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html)
Looking at California's demand-profile it appears almost flat throughout the day (page 3 http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Combi...). I dont see an obvious reaon why other cities would follow a different profile, so no I dont think that assumption is correct. The problem is indeed cost, but more the cost of storing the energy created by green renwables to be used when the wind isnt blowing or the sun isnt shining. If anything electricity will become much more expensive and become cheaper not overnight but instead when the weather is great. Indeed this is whats happening in Germany as a result of their energiewende program
A flat demand profile is definitely not normal. Do i really need to explain that the rest of the country doesn’t have same weather as California...
Utilities can't design just for the average month, but the worst ones, and the worst hours of the worst days. Building new peak demand (peaker) plants is very expensive and most consumers probably don't see the actual market prices during those times. Shifting load by a very small percent could result in a decent cost savings and/or avoid building new capacity.
In practice it’s a little more complex as maintenance cycles for example are lined based on seasonal demand, but that’s offset by much higher transmission losses when the temperatures are highest.
Really, the US electric grid is designed to share power between states, that’s just part of capacity planning. Further, sharing power is a cost saving measure and happens as soon as importing power costs less than using a peaking power plant. It still requires someone to have built the generating capacity, but it’s much easier to add 1GW of base load capacity at a time when your selling some of that to a different state.
As to minor differences 50GW is 67% larger than 30 GW that’s a huge swing over the course of a day. At 0.5 KW per person in CA x 4 miles per kWh x 12 hours x 365 days, that’s 8,760 miles per year which is almost enough on it’s own. Suggesting at most a minimal capacity increase.
In absence of demand-based pricing and clever "when will you need the car again?"-UI (both are necessary to see an effective load spread) all the cars from evening rush hour will meet again for evening rush hour 2, the grid edition, during supper and immediately after. At the time of nighttime overcapacity most will already be on sustain trickle.
This will probably flip once solar becomes our largest (or among the largest) electrical energy source.
I imagine a future where daytime power is primarily supplied by solar, and nighttime power by nuclear. And with wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. becoming ancillary energy sources.
This is something I think about a lot, and it's also what prevented me from purchasing an EV recently -- I live in an apartment and park in a surface lot; street parking would be even less feasible for charging.
My question is to anyone who may know the answer: is there any research/modeling being done regarding the intersection of declining home ownership and increased EV adoption/feasibility?
Most of my peers can't afford a home but would prefer an electric vehicle. Workplace charging is often suggested as the answer, how does a shift to remote work change that? A lot of moving parts and I'm curious if someone more qualified than me has crunched the numbers.
The poor always suffer. Rich people will buy endless junk but since they can afford a tesla they think they're doing something
It makes sense if you are really into gas cars or an eletric car doesn't work for you, but the charging problem for people living in apartments will be fixed eventually. It's already fixed in a few cities.
Sorry we can't afford luxury electric cars like the rich SV people on here
Really depends on where you live, work and what your commute route looks like. An EV with 300mi of range can be treated like a gas car - stop to charge every week or two instead of gassing up.
I had a supercharger 1 mile away, and 3 more in a 20 minute radius. One urban supercharger was at a grocery/Target and another was at a Museum/Garden, so in those situations I’d park longer for a deep charge and make use of my time productively. I never ever just sat in my car for 20..30..60min like some people imagine you might.
If you need gas it's 5 minutes. if you need emergency electric charge, well, you're screwed.
Its worth noting that regularly using superchargers is murder on your battery, long term. After 600 charge cycles with no fast charge, you will still have 90% battery capacity, as opposed to 80% capacity if using super charging 30% of the time. If you use super charging 50% of the time, you will reduce your capacity to 75% after only 300 charge cycles. [1]
[1] https://evannex.com/blogs/news/debunking-3-myths-about-elect...
I don't have and stats to say either way but it is a scenario that i'd like said stats for :)
And the historical selection of 110 V in the US doesn't help.
Where in the world are utilities offering this? I live in W. PA and every utility service out here laughed at me when I inquired about these kinds of things.
Now, last night was exceptionally windy. However, wind turbines generation is growing by about 10-20% annually. Accordingly, in a few years 20,000 MW overnight wind generation will become the Texas median production rate or even will fall among the lower percentiles of production.
The article that the NY Times references [2] shows how the 100% electric fleet demand compares to the current daily load profiles in Texas and California. The Texas grid, as depicted, shows a peak at 3PM -- for now. However, if there were 100% EVs, that peak would shift to 3AM. Then, in addition to the typically abundant wind energy, natural gas (peaked) generators could come online to easily deliver more power.
Something like 60-70% of Texas daily wind generation occurs between 9PM and 9AM, because of the diurnal wind patterns. This means that the usually strong nightly winds allows Texas to outproduce electricity at 3AM as compared to 3PM.
In contrast to the habits of California EV drivers, Texas drivers get 80-90% of their annual charge needs by plugging in overnight at their homes. So, the Texas grid is uniquely suited to host a rapidly growing EV fleet.
[EDIT] 9,000 MW would provide 1 kWh for 10 hrs for each car of 9,000,000 EV cars to get 30+ miles of range. So, yeah, last night the Texas grid could accommodate all of them.
1. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.htm...
2. https://theconversation.com/switching-to-electric-vehicles-c...
Tesla Model 3's are nice, but if you're an economical driver the cost per mile is still way higher than a hybrid. Ugh.
EDIT: To clarify I'm referring to the total cost per mile, not just the cost to drive a mile - the Model 3 wins in that regard as far as I know. The problem is that the Model 3 costs tens of thousands of dollars more than the cheapest hybrids, so unless you're going to keep your Model 3 for like 300K miles it's not worth it on a purely economical basis.
If you compare to a gas car, again on a purely economical basis, it's even more lopsided. Factor in used vehicles and even more so. I ended up just buying a used Corolla in the end sadly since it was cheaper and from my understanding more environmentally friendly.
TLDR: If you want to be "environmentally friendly" that means minimizing driving. However, if you minimize driving it makes basically no sense, economically or environmentally to buy an electric car - you're better off buying a fuel efficient used vehicle. Please correct me if you believe I'm wrong in this thinking.
For example, in CA current regular grade fuel is about $3.40/gal. A Prius gets 60mpg, which works out to 6c/mile.
For electricity, the average rate in CA is 24c/kWh. A model 3 uses 250 Wh/mile which works out to 6c/mile.
So exactly the same price per mile. A small change in either fuel price could advantage one or the other.
Of course you can take advantage of overnight lower EV charging rates, or drive to an area with cheaper gas, but at least with current average energy prices, there isn't a huge difference in per mile energy consumption costs.
You still have to keep track and change the oil, and the coolant. You still have a water pump and spark plugs and all this other stuff to keep track of.
AND you have all the EV worries like the battery.
But its maintenance is very low. Very little wear on it.
On the other hand, the bmw i3 is a serial hybrid. I think the two models are basically an EV and an EV+generator (range extender). One got more subsidies than the other.
What I wonder about is - what happens to the i3 when the electric battery is depleted and all you have is the generator? Can you maintain speed? Will you run out of battery first or run out of fuel?
In the US the rex comes on when the main battery is down to 7% charge. (Europe or re-coding the car allows you to set when it comes on -- up to 75% I believe? I haven't coded either of mine) You can actually outrun the rex engine with the right combination of high speed, climbing grade, or cold weather. If it gets to 0% the car will literally shut down. A serious warning appears at 2% about this.
I've never had mine below 2.5% (there is a setting on the driver display that allows you to display this number). It takes uphill driving over 75mph in cold to really draw down those last few % and outrun the range extender.
The rex tank is 9L, so it adds about 70-100mi to the total range of the car depending on how you drive it. We add a few gallons a year to ours, as the EV itself is sufficient -- it's great for those surprises life throws you where you need another few miles.
$0.02. :)
"Analysis of real-world maintenance and repair cost data from thousands of CR members shows that BEV and PHEV owners are paying half as much as ICE owners are paying to repair and maintain their vehicles."
"The data were filtered to remove: ● Incomplete responses. ● Vehicles that reported traveling less than 2,000 miles in the past 12 months. ● Vehicles that reported traveling more than 60,000 miles in the past 12 months. ● Vehicles that reported maintenance costs of over $20,000 over the past 12 months. ● Vehicles with more than 200,000 total miles."
Hopefully lithium batteries aren't reaching 200f degrees;
FWIW, my next car will be a Model Y.
The car also keeps track of gas miles and gives you an estimate for remaining oil life. Under typical usage, that results in an oil change every couple of years. I think that the spark plugs are 100K plugs so they will eventually need replacing but not often.
Also, the just off lease C-max was very inexpensive, and gets huge gas mileage, so even if it explodes, whatever. It got me a carpool sticker for a year too.
This prevents an existing vehicle (for which the carbon cost to manufacture it is sunk) from being abandoned, but using it as a backup vehicle means it won't be driven more than a minimum, and having your gas be "expensive" on a per-km basis creates the proper incentives to avoid driving except where necessary.
Economically it's more or less the same, but a better quality of life.
We do have another family in our circle are are carfree and they make it work with a combination of rentals and every now and then they borrow our car in exchange for babysitting and other favours.
I do think that electric has a lower maintenance cost, even accounting for the battery, but it's not that low that i think you can make up a 30k price difference.
If you plan on keeping the car for 10 years and drive 1000km per month. The up front 30k are 3k per year or 250 per month. That's quite a lot of an additional fixed cost for not having moved yet.
You can get a 2018 year model (premier trim level w/ driver confidence 2 - the highest possible trim level combination) with 13,000 miles on it for $17k.
Due to living on dirt roads I passed on it, but it's a pretty good deal if you commute and can charge at your destination. 52 mile range all electric, 400 miles combined range.
It's got fairly low clearance, but it's heavy and has excellent traction. Handles excellent in snow with good winter tires.
It's subjective, but the styling of Volt, Bolt, Leaf, Prius, i3, id.3 are all turn-offs for me.
GM's issue has always been they have played the compliance game while claiming otherwise. Even Ford is doing it now with the Mach E by limiting availability to 50k models, a number a third of the sales of vehicles they have cancelled for low unsustainable sales.
I never bought my TM3 to save money, buying any new car pretty much is a losing proposition. I bought it because it was cool. It was the closest I have even seen to those dream/concept cars from the seventies and eighties. All those cars with radical exteriors and even more radical interiors. Well someone built it.
Is it perfect. No. However as an EV is had my most important feature. Range. I could care less about its 0-60mph times. I want range. I want to drive to my friends in the boonies and back in all seasons without having to divert to charge. I want to be able to skip chargers because I have the range to do so.
Plus remember, every range number given should be hedged by multiplying it by 0.90 as no manufacturer suggests charging to 100% all the time.
On a side note : Do not buy FSD. Tesla will not let you transfer it to another Tesla and even right now trade ins to Tesla are hit and miss as they have been giving ZERO dollars on trade for the feature. You don't need it for lane keep assist or traffic aware cruise control. I don't care if you believe Tesla can or cannot deliver it, the simple matter here is they don't honor you by giving you anything for it on trade; something that Elon claims to be looking into
So they have a team inside Ford and they basically told them to go all out on the vehicle and they did a nice job. These guys however are still sort of separate from overall Ford and the car is basically designed to sell well and not lose them to much money. Ford has the issue that they simply don't have battery supply to scale their EV production.
They are getting batteries from LG in Europe right now but all new capacity is basically already reserved for all the Europeans. They simply can't copy the Model Y and sell 300k a year, specially because to match the Y in specs, they needed to put more battery into it.
I agree with your point on FSD. They said they would start to value it during trade in now, but even so, when you sell it privately, if the buyer doesn't want FSD its harder to sell, its limits the pool of people who want it.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/11/heres-everything-we-kno...
https://www.motor1.com/features/382783/ford-mustang-mach-e-b...
I'd be quite interested in a peek behind the curtains with that much detail, but I don't think that much has been said publicly and I wonder if it's just the parent making inferences.
GM lost money on every Volt and loses money on every Bolt. Tesla is rumored to sell at a lost and make up for it by selling clean energy credits to the likes of Fiat Chrysler.
It's well known that all of Ford and GM's past EVs were compliance cars.
If you spend $1bn to develop a car you sell 100k of break even, you just lost $10k per car. But that doesn't mean you're going to lose twice as much if you double the production.
If they were going to lose 10-15k per incremental unit, that's horrific and I'd love to know the details, that's why I'm asking.
It's not as if GM goes back and adjusts the R&D % applied to the 97 Corvette when they sell an LS engine. The R&D cost of every subsequent vehicle that reuses something off the shelf is going to be cheaper.
Tesla R&D is so ridiculously efficient. I wouldn't be surprised if a Model 3 from scratch costs traditional auto companies an order of magnitude more to develop.
So the first EV models inevitably come out, amortizing a large amount of R&D over a limited run, and it looks like an absolute disaster for margins.
It doesn't necessarily mean things aren't going well - although it certainly can!
The detailed economics is conjecture, based on different statements and some assumptions. Sorry, I didn't want to come across as this being certain knowledge. Maybe the lose on the Mach-E are still pretty bigger. Maybe they changed from the compliance because they wanted to have a flag ship for marketing.
This is just how I interpreted it, they wanted to sell a 'compliance car' that they could actually sell for a premium price and have premium options on.
However, you can get insane deal on some EV, like the Bolt. They are not close to Tesla in terms of many things, but if you just need to everyday driving, its perfectly reasonable.
The grid is designed to handle the peak hour of a ten-year period. Increasing that peak is very expensive. However, because most of the grid is fixed-cost. The marginal cost of generation is between 1/2 and 1/3 the cost of electricity.
California is moving to variable electricity prices (so-called Time of Use). Electricity is more expensive between 4-9 PM when it's more expensive to provide electricity. So, if people charge their EVs when it's less expensive to do so, we'll be fine. But regulators will need to continue to align electricity price with electricity cost.
4-9pm might be the only time I have to do laundry and cook, two of the most energy intensive tasks, if I’m working a 9-5 job that requires me to be physically present. I can’t do it during the day and sometimes I can’t do it on the weekend because of other obligations. So now I’m landed with a “tax” that I have no ability to avoid.
And then you drive to Rodeo drive, where stores have their doors wide open in 100 degree heat, while their AC is on full blast, and wonder why the fuck you’re stuck paying the energy tax.
Laundry energy use can't be amortized like a fridge can. They use an extreme amount of energy in short bursts. If you time your laundry incorrectly in a TOU setting, you absolutely will have a larger energy bill. I know this because I've been burned by it. 9c/kwH (low TOU) vs. 14c (high) is more than a 50% price increase for a load of laundry.
It is regressive but at least in CA the reason is to discourage use because demand exceeds grid capacity and results in rolling blackouts. The alternative is to plan blackouts for parts of the grid during high demand times. Solar and battery are incentivized so many homes use zero power during peak times or backfeed power onto the grid.
I dont know the specifics- i.e. if not all of their vehicles could go a full day of charging- but only that yes, there are mechanisms in place to force those who can afford it to adapt.
Everyone else has to hope they can plug into a smart grid that only actually charges when the price drops.
Most of the things the US is going to go through we have already been through.
You can look at how we dealt with things such as charging at apartments. I live in an apartment in Norway so this was indeed an issue when I first inquired about getting an EV. Eventually however they started doing upgrades allowing us to connect multiple chargers in the garages.
We have not experience problems with the grid but I am also of the impression that our grid is newer than what is common in the US. The biggest problem is the shared chargers. People get angry about inconsiderate drivers hogging a charging spot for too long.
Also service for EVs is under heavy load.
In fact there is a battle over building wind turbines in Norway now, because we need them to cover higher future electricity demand from EVs. And of course nobody wants them in their backyard.
In this version of Norway, every single Norwegian would own at least one car. Generally you own multiple cars, because if your one car goes to the shop, you cannot leave your house - it would take hours to walk or bike to work!
This version of Norway, as you can imagine, has way, way way more cars. Specifically, roughly twice as many (~400 cars per 1000 Norwegians vs ~800 cars per 1000 Americans). And they drive, way, way way more miles per year.
When you combine the much higher number of vehicles in America with the much higher number of annual miles driven, the American challenge, in kWh added to the grid, is perhaps 4-5 times the size of the Norwegian one.
Not to mention that, in Norway there is a single grid maintained by a single operator working in lock-step with the national governments climate priorities. In America there are three grids managed by nine regional operators that all hate each other in various fascinating ways.
All to say. There are definitely lessons, but Americas relationship to cars makes the "Norway can ramp car sales to 50% BEV why can't you" argument misplaced. It's like arguing that since the US grid adds, per quarter, twice as many BEVs as the Norwegian grid adds per year, why can't Norway take some pointers from the US? Well, because that's a silly comparison.
All I am saying is that it is useful to look at a country that is farther ahead in the transition process to get an idea of how your own reality will look in the future.
Don't build this up to something it isn't. I was not trying to make a pissing contest between the US an Norway ;-)
I do wish EVs in the United States weren't such an excuse to not think about rail.
Or, if you will, that the Norwegian lessons aren't that useful to the USA. The differences are bigger than any similarity.
Also, I know a lot of people who are buying EVs are also installing solar. While it's not a perfect match for a person with a 9-5 job, it is a fantastic solution for the growing number of remote workers. This is what I am doing personally.
I understand that a lot of people don't have places (or the money) where they can install solar so it's not a solution for everyone.
That is after solar production tapers off, so solar without batteries doesn't help the grid.
Most EVs and many chargers can be programmed to charge at set times. So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest.
This will actually help the grid because today power companies have to throttle up and down production to meet peak demand then overnight lull. By charging EVs at night it will allow production to remain pretty consistent.
Another factor no one seems to get is that people aren't going to charge nightly. This is like making the argument that our gasoline grid isn't capable of refueling every car simultaneously.
> So you set your EV to charge after midnight when demand is lowest.
As more and more solar comes online, this is becoming less true. It may be beneficial to charge during daylight hours in the summer time. A lot of this is regional too.
I think that battery is going to become as important as solar to the future grid. Battery allows you to timeshift demand and could allow power companies to operate plants at a constant rate rather than throttling up and down. As renewables displace fossils, batteries will play even more important a role.
We got solar + batteries in late November and it's been an interesting experience. We're on time-of-use billing to the batteries have allowed us to completely avoid peak charges.
According to fueleconomy.gov a honda accord costs $1400/year in gasoline in the US.
There's got to be a way to put that towards solar panels, then at some point your transportation costs (for energy) go to zero.
But I think the real challenge will be for the last km. It's a nice idea to add the charger to lamppost and so on. But how do we cope with increased demand there then? We are talking about dozens or hundreds of extra kilowatts of demand compared to current. And the current local grids just aren't designed and build for that. Even bigger problem in places where people commute to, with potential of hundreds of kilowatts of extra demand in relatively short window of time...
Grid basically works with electricity being produced in large plant, then it's voltage is raised for long distance transmission, at other end it is lowered in stages. And all of these stages have limited capacity of how much electricity can pass through them. And there isn't too much extra in these as that would cost more. So it's a big thing to build up...
Is this true? Distribution lines are obviously run with demand in mind, but I wouldn't be shocked if utilities ran last mile lines with copper that's twice as thick as it needed to be because they optimistically projected future demand, copper was cheap, and they didn't want to come back and run more lines.
Would be happy to be have my concerns assuaged.
I don't have a good understanding of the grid, but I have heard that if more and more cars go from 400V to 800V+ that could cause issues in cities as well, but I don't understand it technically. How many cars will actually go to high voltage architecture is not clear yet.
Americans like big vehicles. This is solely lacking in the electric department. Americans also like convenience - no matter how many ways you try to slice and dice the argument it's less convenient right now.
When EVs get bigger (more utility) and have longer charge and shorter charging time, they will take off. It just isn't there yet.
If you have a Volt or a Leaf can you use a Telsa charger?
With managed charging / demand response and day ahead weather forecasting you'd rarely need to spin up a gas turbine. On the coasts wind is strongest at night, the distribution grid is at minimum load and cars are parked. Seems like a perfect match.
Back in the early part of the 20th century Vermont had extensive train access to ski areas, apparently. And much of the alps is accessed this way (tho in general European travel by rail is much more of a thing)
I'm guessing you probably still needed transportation of some sort from the train stations to the mountains.
One of the issues with just having a bus is that a lot of ski resorts have multiple base areas and most of the lodging and eating options are off-mountain. Some are pretty self-contained but the layout for resorts in the northeast for example pretty much presupposes that you have a car if you're going for a weekend.
There are self-contained exceptions of course but many aren't.
And I recall that Steamboat Springs Colorado has something like this; shuttles from airport, hotels, ski areas.
So yes, they will be able to recover some energy on the way down and reduce wear on brakes, but they'll have to make sure their batteries are up to the task.
EDIT My mistake - not a duplicate... below linked article is categorized under business, this one is under climate, and content is different (though related, of course!)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969677 "G.M.'S Electric Car Goal Blindsides Rivals and Shakes Up an Industry"
Both are looking into the effects of GM's plan to take manufacturing electrical cars seriously - infrastructure and the competitive landscape.
PG&E would indicate that the answer is no
Bring on the charging station infrastructure.
Hydrogen is not an energy source but rather an energy carrier, like a battery. If you want to use hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that can exchange cells at street stations you need extra energy clean-energy capacity to make the hydrogen. There are still plenty of hurdles.
People have trouble dealing with exponentials; they lack the imagination. But the fact is, we're about to see an orders of magnitude shift in prices and capacity when it comes to energy production. If you are thinking in terms of the current supply and demand, you're basically off by magnitudes. Our very near future is this market being disrupted to the extreme.
An EV is basically a big battery with plenty of capacity for soaking up excess energy during off-peak hours and delivering back to the grid during peak hours. So, you could be deceived into thinking that the challenge is simply infrastructure for leveraging this capacity. People are actually working on this and it's not particularly hard from a technical point of view.
For reference, most grid battery being installed currently is still sub GWH. Anything over a few hundred MWH is considered news worthy. A Tesla has about 60kwh. A million of those is 60GWH; that's some serious capacity. There are about a quarter billion cars in the US; or about the equivalent of 12.5 TWH if we set the average EV battery to 50KWH and they would all be converted to electric. The US produces about 4000 TWH of energy every year (a bit over) currently; so 12.5 TWH of battery that can be charged/discharged in hours, is a lot of capacity. Arguably much more than actually needed (currently). So plug that in, and problem solved.
Of course, that's not the solution to this challenge but a very narrow tunnel vision of a hypothetical part of the solution (involving just car batteries). It will never happen because it won't be economical.
In reality, there will be mass deployment of wind, solar, and all sorts of grid energy storage that is probably a lot more cost effective than car optimized lithium ion batteries. Companies will be producing this as fast as they can for the foreseeable future and it will be like printing money in terms of business opportunity. Basically demand will be insatiable for the foreseeable future. The lower the prices get, the higher the demand and there is not enough supply as it is so prices are pretty good.
We have decades to crack this nut; so charging cars is going to be a complete and utter non issue by the time all those quarter billion cars have converted (2040-2050 timeframe). But the flip side is that operating the remaining ICE vehicles will have become uneconomical long before that (about 5 years from now). So, people will be buying EVs at a premium just to get in on the action of lowering their cost for the foreseeable future. If you can afford it; great but lots of people will be burning cash (quite literally) for some time to come because they can't.
Actually, when everybody finally has converted, energy prices will have dropped so low that the upside of renting out your car battery for grid support won't be worth the trouble unless you can do it at scale. It makes sense at today's prices but with a few decades of improvements in cost and efficiency it won't; not even close.
This is the bit people struggle with. Energy is expensive currently and people assume this will remain true. The lesson of the past decade is that solar went from being 100x more expensive to being the cheapest option. It's not done dropping in price unless you happen to suffer from extreme pessimism regarding scientific and industrial progress on this front in the next decades. This being HN, I assume you are not that foolish. IMHO the only debate worth having right now is on the number of orders of magnitude we are talking. I worry about being too conservative here.
With solar and wind, the cost of energy is basically a function of the purchase cost of the infrastructure and how long it will keep mining energy from the sun/atmosphere (for absolutely nothing whatsoever). Current equipment is rated for decades of use. So, as that stuff gets cheaper and better, the $ per kwh will continue dropping to the point where it is no longer interesting for consumers to worry about such mundane things as efficiency or price per kwh. When a GWH is basically a dollar, why bother renting out your car battery for pennies? It doesn't make sense. When the equipment needed to generate a lifetime supply of energy for the vehicle is a fraction of its purchase price, why even think of it as variable cost?
Charging a Tesla at grid prices currently costs you about the price of a cup of coffee (maybe plus a cheap lunch if you use a supercharger, which of course you won't most of the time). That's right now at rates that are basically reflecting the old expensive coal+gas+nuclear world we are still in. It's a hard sell as it is to spend a lot of time and energy monetizing that. Imagine that dropping by 100x. That's roughly what is going to play out over the next few decades. Any math involving today's prices is basically going to be wrong by orders of magintude.
That's the real challenge for grid suppliers: surviving in a world where most of their current infrastructure is obsolete and about 100x more expensive than the market rate for energy. It's going to be brutal if you are in that line of business unless you keep up. If your business is burning coal, your life is going to suck. But good riddance.
The challenge for grid operators is continuing to function in that world. It will involve aggressively investing in renewables + cheap storage + transport (aka. wires) just to stay in business. That's basically what they are doing. Some more so than others. Investors already moved their money.
Thanks Greenpeace.
Looking back with hindsight a few container ships worth of radioactive waste seems like a much better problem to have than an atmosphere with too much CO2 in it.
I think you’ve got your math a bit wrong - average cost of electricity in CA is .24/kWh, while my marginal cost for electricity is .42/kWh. That makes charging a tesla battery a $20-$40 proposition, not a $5 one.
A lot of homes from the 60s-70s in my area only have 100a-125a 2-Phase service. That's quite inadequate do get a meaningful charge quickly.
It stinks that 3-phase is really only available to commercial areas.
All homes on their street have electrical service entering from the opposite side of the driveway. So if they wanted a car charger the house would have to be rewired, service upgraded.
Electric vehicles are for the young and rich.
240V 30A is over 7kw. Even a 15A 120V is enough to charge a typical electric car.
Cloth and/or ungrounded wiring is a electrocution and fire hazard and should be considered unsafe for anybody using basic electrics near any water source, much more if it has any load. This warning should be more pronounced for elderly, children, or people who have not been accustomed to it.
This is not much different than the Lowndes Al homes that haven't had working septic in 30 years that are bringing back hookworm.
But it's not too difficult to fix that if you get a charger installed.
If the neutral wire breaks the ground is for safety. Otherwise the hot needs a path and that will probably be the car itself, or most likely you.
Knob and tube was discontinued in the 1940s not 1970s.
So you're saying that your perfect example of a house that is behind on maintenance...
would only require...
A quick job to wire the 240 to the garage that every other house that isn't behind on safety maintenance.
If you're lucky, the electrician would install a modern code compliant panel while on the job.
That "quick job" costs a lot of money probably $15K not to mention the labour and time involved. And to a garage that doesn't exist.
My point being adding modern things more power hungry like an EV are not easy for older homes. Renovating to update the entire electrical system is not cheap.
You don't have to rewire the rest of the house to extend the 240 across the width of the house. 240 is the least integrated wiring. And every house (new and old) that needs a driveway or garage placement requires the same wiring change.
If you wanted, the cheapest option is to move the service point (no cost)
50yr ago is 1971. They weren't using cloth insulated wiring in 1971.
From the 1930s through whenever romex became common they used BX shielded cable which only relies on the cloth to provide color coding and UV shielding for the rubber that insulates the wire and the cable shielding acts as the ground.
>the lack of maintenance is updating the circuit panel first and wires second, I believe this is the _ $15k you're referencing.
Not fixing stuff that isn't broke isn't "lack of maintenence"
The vast majority of people do not live in the world of million dollar properties where half of everything gets renovated with each new owner.
Most likely you wouldn't have to rewire the branch circuits. A panel swap and new service entrance should run you about $3k (depending on location and inflation).
Either we accept nuclear energy as "clean" and massively stock up in this area (also investing massively in next generation nuclear, like fusion power), or we'll face a huge backlash in a few years. Or we invent a next-generation battery which is cheap enough (on resources) and improve upon existing energy storage by at least one order of magnitude.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/12/f69/GITT%20I...
Furthermore, you can capture the CO2 of a the fossil based electric plant way more easily than putting all this machinery into each and every car. Retrofitting filters etc. is also way easier than telling your voters to buy new cars with better filters.
The US is heavily dependent on air conditioning, for example. What would happen if the available energy was low in summer nights? Some kind of base energy backup needs to be there, and the energy cost of air conditioning alone is huge.
This isn't some theoretical plan, people have been using air conditioning for a long time.