Us crosses the electric-car tipping point for mass adoption | Hacker News Reader

Us crosses the electric-car tipping point for mass adoption

bloomberg.com

47 pointshelsinkiandrew141 comments

IMO, electric cars are still too expensive for broad adoption. There really needs to be a strong used market for them before broad adoption is realistic. The charging story (overnight plug-in) is also too expensive for most folks, too (most dense housing has no garages for the installation of a charger).

I’m in the north, where 110v plugs are somewhat common for block heaters, but “common” still only means about 30% coverage. There’s also not enough room for anything but a standard power cable.

Side note, can you imagine how bad thefts of copper rich, exotic connectors would be?

EVs are (much) cheaper to run, for commuters that need a steady, predictable mileage within range, they are already less expensive in TCO terms for comparable quality/comfort.

In Europe, where gas is insanely taxed, the operational costs of EVs are 4-5 times lower than ICE, you can save about 10,000€ per 100,000 km (62,000 miles) .

> EVs are (much) cheaper to run [..] already less expensive in TCO terms for comparable quality/comfort.

Errm, I would love this claim to be true for the smallest and cheapest new cars. Is it?

Our smaller car cost €10k to buy outright, new, a few years ago. At that time the very same car was available as an EV for €23k. I'm concerned about climate change, fairly pro-EV, but we simply didn't have €13k to spare.

We have every intention of keeping that car for another five years, unless something major goes wrong (all it's needed is standard servicing so far)

Petrol and diesel have gone up everywhere, but electricity rates are rising too.

Q: When will I be able to buy a four seater EV with similar range for a similar (inflation adjusted) price as the petrol-engined version?

Assuming that a vehicle goes 250,000 km before hitting the scrap heap:

250,000km / 6 kWh/km * 0.30 €/kWh overnight rate = €12,500

2500 100km * 6 l/100km * 2 €/l = €30,000

You could have saved substantially more than €13k, even if you had to finance the difference.

Lifetime TCO is the proper metric, even if you only keep your car for 5 years. 2 major reasons. 1) anybody buying a used car obviously cares about costs, so is going to value fuel savings quite highly and should be willing to pay the appropriate premium. 2) In 5 years time in Europe the gasoline infrastructure will be starting to degrade and most used buyers will want EV's.

It's highly unlikely that most consumers will get 250,000km (150k miles) out of a vehicle. The median ownership of a vehicle is under 5 years, and the median miles per year for a non-commercial vehicle is 12,000.

Plus, you'll have to also pay the interest on that loan, and good credit is a must to avoid being stabbed in the back with interest rates with car lenders.

EDIT: This does mean that a used car market for EVs is quite viable though.

Lifetime TCO is the appropriate metric. That's life of the car, not how long a single owner has it.

Median lifetime is 19 years. At 12,000 miles/year that's 228,000 miles.

Respectfully, repeating it won't make it true.

For a vast majority of car buyers, there are only two prices they will care about. How much it costs when they get it, and how much they get when they sell it.

And to the original point, a low TCO will have no impact one someone's ability to buy the car in the first place.

How much they get when they sell it is directly related to the remaining TCO of the car.

Not at all. Much like any other transaction under capitalism, it's based on what the buyer and seller can come to an agreement on. The cost to the seller is what they've paid, not how much might be saved over the coming years.

And if you include a middleman, like a dealer for a trade-in, they won't ever pay for gas or maintenance, so they're even less inclined to factor the remaining TCO into the price.

The price the buyer and seller agree on is a price between what the seller is willing to sell at and the price the buyer is willing to buy at.

The price the buyer is willing to buy at is directly related to the costs he is going to incur operating the vehicle.

In a world where electric second hand cars exist, the second-hand price of most ICE cars will be negative, sellers will have to give you money to accept the high fueling and maintenance costs.

> The median ownership of a vehicle is under 5 years, and the median miles per year for a non-commercial vehicle is 12,000.

So how do the resale values for 5 year old EVs with 60k miles on the clock (or more accurately on the battery) look?

When we bought the little petrol car the salesman saw us looking at the EV and there was a brief discussion, back then he said that resale values for cars like that were "a complete unknown" ...

The little car has ~50,000km (~31,000 miles) on it so far, and even if its resale value after 5 years were to be zero I guess the most I've lost is the full purchase price, €10k.

How does that work with a EV that not only costs much more up front but probably loses fractional value faster, too?

EDIT: just checked the current prices, the latest model is (in round figures) €15,000 and as an EV it's €25,000. The trade seems to want to describe the latter as "affordable" but to me it's simply an extra €10k up front that I don't have right now. The range of the EV is basically 1/3 that of the petrol version.

> 6 l/100km

Our of interest, where's that figure from?

We're talking a tiny car with a suitably tiny engine. I'm not exactly racing it around.

Our seven seater people carrier achieved better than that(!!) a few days ago, getting 4.7l/100km average on a 200km trip.

I don't disagree, but TCO savings will only offset the larger up-front costs after nearly a decade+ of ownership (and most families in the US keep their cars for less than 5 years).

The TCO for a used car is often even lower (even if the environmental cost is high), since you will pay a fraction of the cost of an EV, and some used cars can easily get over 30 mpg.

The lifetime TCO of an electric car for most people is significantly lower than the lifetime TCO of a gasoline vehicle. If you put 250,000 miles on a F150 Lightning you'll save over $40,000 in most jurisdictions. Considering the truck starts at $40,000 that's a pretty substantial savings!

While absolutely true, that's a savings of $40k over 10+ years, yet you have to pay off that $40k in 5 (closer to $45-$50k with interest). You also need pretty dang good credit to avoid getting hit with a huge interest rate.

Even with a lower total cost of ownership, folks still have to be able to buy it in the first place.

Absolutely. IMO the government should be providing interest free loans rather than tax credits to facilitate the adoption of electric vehicles and residential solar.

My god. Can you imagine the uproar that would cause in the financial industry, where they can easily charge 20% interest rates for folks with poor credit, because they need a car to survive?

In other words, it will never happen. It'd be awesome, but it's a dream at best.

You've reminded me how many very different circumstances exist besides my own. I paid less than $15k for a 3yo PHEV pre-Russian invasion. It has a ~9kWh battery with <30 mile range. It saves me about $5/day on gas. I charge it every night on a 110v outlet for ~$0.70 and again at work for free (lucky me; $140.00/year perk saves me $500 gas).

I could probably sell it for $18-20k today. (Four-door,five seatbelts with tons of leg room.) But you're right that it wouldn't make sense for apartment dwellers. And that counts a lot of people out.

As someone who despises internal combustion engines I would love to get a battery-electric vehicle, but the delta between what I owe on the car (zero, fortunately)--and what I'd need to spend--would pay for gasoline for decades. I imagine other people feel similarly. Tax incentives help, but are a virtual drop in the gas tank. Still, should I need to replace my car, the only viable option for me is a BEV.

There are so many myths about charging, mostly coming from people who don't own an EV.

Most people don't realize that BEVs (not hybrids) have batteries large enough to last a whole week of commuting. This gives a lot of flexibility in when and where they can be charged.

They're typically configured to charge overnight, when charging speed doesn't matter, and electricity demand is low (if the demand shifts, they could be configured to charge at different times, e.g. when they're parked at work). EVs are designed to be left charging unattended, so they can just be left plugged in whenever they're parked. That's a different use-case than quarter-megawatt chargers for road trips.

New cars have vehicle-to-load capability built-in already, and there are trials to use them as grid storage. The more EVs there are, the more they can be used to shift renewable energy and flatten the duck curve. EVs can help the grid, not strain it.

Large fast charging sites for road trips typically have their own batteries, because it allows them to have cheaper lower-power connection to the grid, do price arbitrage, and use their own renewables. This is also a place where degraded batteries from old EVs can be reused.

Of course the electric grid will need to be expanded. Lament about that sounds like developed countries have forgotten how to develop infrastructure?

Do you really want the grid taking energy out of your car when it needs it?

Would you want petrol stations siphoning fuel out of your car when they are running low?

Why not, as long as I got paid for it?

Because you'll get back to your car to find that its tank is empty and you can't drive anywhere. They'd have to pay a substantial premium for that to be worthwhile.

I mean obviously there would be some kind of floor in terms of how much range you are willing to be left with. If you're willing to discharge your car lower, you can take greater advantage of arbitrage opportunities, but obviously your car could be lower at any point in time.

You can control how much is given to the grid, and say that e.g. it has to have 60%+ left at all times.

There's no need to keep cars charged to 100% all the time. They already have batteries that are overkill for daily commutes, and if you suddenly need to make a long trip, you can top it up in 20 minutes from a highway charger.

BTW, on the Internet there's always some guy who just has to have a 500-mile daily commute while towing a boat, through a desert, in snow, uphill both ways. That's fine, they can opt out.

Note that the charging connector isn't a dumb plug like a household appliance. It has a two-way communication protocol that negotiates all of the parameters.

It won't drain below X% and will charge when below Y%

Potentially draining down the battery down to 80%

Yes. Because it means fewer peaker power stations need to be built. And I care a hell of a lot more about that than whether my battery is at 86% or 94% when I wake up or get out of work.

That seems pretty alarmist.

This system hasn't been implemented yet, but when it is, I'm sure electric vehicle owners will be able to set the conditions at which they push energy onto the grid: electric price > $X, only drain battery to Y%, etc.

If you gave me $3 for the gallon of gas I bought yesterday for $2, I would sell it if I had 10 gallons in my tank

Even better, a very similar system is currently being implemented by Tesla (under the name Tesla Virtual Power Plant). It's for their Powerwall product rather than the cars, but I think it's safe to assume they'd design a similar system for their cars.

It looks like the Virtual Power Plant program lets you configure a backup reserve, so you can choose how much of the capacity you keep for yourself and only push a small portion of the battery's capacity to the grid.

Using electric vehicles as batteries seems like a good way to run extra cycles through your car and need a replacement battery. It would seem to be a useful emergency feature, but not a steady state part of the grid.

It can be a simple free market thing: you earn enough from renting your battery to make it worth the extra cycles. Or if the grid operator can build enough cheaper energy storage themselves, then they won't use your v2l capability.

If there's going to be an increased demand for grid-stabilizing storage, it will price the supply accordingly.

If its a simple free market thing, then you won't use your car battery to supply the grid, because the economics wouldn't work out. So the issue remains.

In the Tesla virtual grid test in California currently they're paying 50 cents per kWh. That causes 2 cents worth of degradation to the battery, but only if that's a 100% to 0% to 100% cycle. If instead it's a 80% to 20% to 80% cycle, it's about 0.2 cents worth of degradation.

I think OP made the point that in the free market the companies could pay you a certain fee per charge used or something, so that you get remunerated for your battery being used.

Yes and the value you provide to the grid is less than the cost of cycling your car battery. So it wouldn't work out.

You could also pay people to turn magnet wheels for power at night. But it wouldn't work out.

You've provided very little support for your position. To be fair, I don't think you are claiming that the idea of using batteries in such a way doesn't make sense as we already know that there are successful deployments of batteries doing exactly this (I mean, you could argue that those deployments aren't actually successful and that they aren't properly taking into account the replacement costs of their batteries, but I don't think there's evidence of that). So then the argument comes down to, why would a power supplier pay individual owners of relatively small batteries to do this when they could just deploy batteries at scale. That then is the more interesting consideration and I don't think it's actually clear that the economics don't work out. Private batteries have some benefits to power companies, for example the infrastructure to support them is almost free (as it's otherwise already required), there's no long-term risk of building out too much (i mean, there is, but the power company doesn't have that risk), etc. All in, it could be that the power company is better served by building out batteries themselves, but that their own battery storage ends up always under-provisioned and that it is economically beneficial to everyone that they then use private distributed battery storage to shore that up.

This afternoon, in Kansas, the electric company paid us to run our farm off a diesel generator for 3 hours to reduce the load on the grid.

Even though fuel price is high, and a 80kw generator isn't nearly as efficient as the utility company's generators, they still pay enough to make it easily worth it. Including the cost of the generator, which we need anyways.

The electric company could pay enough to more than cover the battery cycle expense.

Plus, if Li-ion are at all similar in this to lead-acid, a deep cycle is many many times more destructive than a shallow cycle.

Do we even know the battery pack replacement cost ? Has any customer paid for it yet or are we still in the honeymoon phase where the manufacturer covers the cost to lure more customers?

Of course the prices are available, for every car model. It's not US healthcare :D

There's also long-term battery health data available now from Teslas and Leaf. Tesla batteries degrade 1%-2% per year on average.

Here are UK battery prices (this is the priciest component of an EV, the upside is that motors and transmission may last car's lifetime):

    Audi e-tron - £6,194.40 (71.2)
    Audi e-tron GT - £8,125.80 (93.4)
    Audi e-tron Sportback - £6,177 (71)
    Audi Q4 e-tron - £4,524 (55)
    BMW i3 - £3,297.30 (37.9)
    BMW i4 - £7,020.90 (80.7)
    BMW iX3 - £6,423.21 (73.83)
    BMW iX - £6,177 (71)
    Citroën ë-Berlingo - £4,350 (50)
    Citroën ë-C4 - £4,350 (50)
    Citroën ë-Spacetourer - £4,350 (50)
    Cupra e-Born - £5,394 (62)
    DS 3 Crossback E-Tense - £4,350 (50)
    Fiat 500e - £2,088 (24)
    Ford Mustang Mach-E - £6,585.90 (75.7)
    Honda e - £3,088.50 (35.5)
    Hyundai Ioniq 5 - £5,063.40 (58.2)
    Hyundai Ioniq Electric - £3,332.10 (38.3)
    Hyundai Kona Electric - £3,410.40 (39.2)
    Jaguar I-Pace - £7,830 (90)
    Kia EV6 - £6,733.80 (77.4)
    Kia e-Niro - £5,568 (64)
    Kia Soul EV - £5,568 (64)
    Lexus UX300e - £4,724.10 (54.3)
    Mazda MX-30 - £3,088.50 (35.5)
    Mercedes-Benz EQA - £5,785.50 (66.5)
    Mercedes-Benz EQB - £5,785.50 (66.5)
    Mercedes-Benz EQC - £6,960 (80)
    Mercedes-Benz EQE - £7,830 (90)
    Mercedes-Benz EQS - £9,378.60 (107.8)
    Mercedes-Benz EQV - £8,700 (100 kWh)
    MG5 EV - £5,315.70 (61.1 kWh)
    MG ZS EV - £4,445.70 (51.1)
    MINI Electric - £2,836.20 (32.6)
    Nissan E-NV200 COMBI - £3,480 (40)
    Nissan Leaf - £3,393 (39)
    Peugeot e-208 - £4,350 (50)
    Peugeot e-2008 - £4,350 (50)
    Peugeot e-Rifter - £4,350 (50)
    Peugeot e-Traveller - £4,350 (50)
    Polestar 2 - £6,003 (69)
    Porsche Taycan - £6,890.40 (79.2)
    Renault Zoe - £4,524 (52)
    Škoda ENYAQ iV - £6,699 (77)
    Škoda ENYAQ Coupe - £6,699 (77)
    Smart fortwo EQ - £1,531.20 (17.6)
    Tesla Model 3 - £5,420.10 (62.3)
    Tesla Model S - £8,700 (100)
    Tesla Model X - £8,700 (100)
    Tesla Model Y - £6,525 (75)
    Vauxhall Combo-e Life - £4,350 (50)
    Vauxhall Corsa-e - £4,350 (50)
    Vauxhall Mokka-e - £4,350 (50)
    Vauxhall Vivaro-e Life - £4,350 (50)
    Volkswagen ID.3 - £5,046 (58)
    Volkswagen ID.4 - £4,524 (52)
    Volkswagen ID.5 - £6,699 (77)
    Volvo C40 Recharge - £6,787 (78)
    Volvo XC40 Recharge - £6,787 (78)

This is the price to replace the entire battery pack for these cars?

These seem _dramatically_ cheaper than I expected. In my mind, I was thinking more like 3-5x this, though that was incl VAT/tax

Post says "battery prices" so I assume that is for the material costs only. I expect labor costs to be a significant adder. It seems replacing an EV's battery would be similar in scope to replacing an ICE car's engine.

Not even close to the same amount of work. Replacing the battery pack in my PHEV, should it ever need replacing, which I doubt, involves removing 20 bolts and unplugging it. It drops right out the bottom of the car.

Ok, so stories like the guy who blew up his Model S because he was told a new battery would be $22,000 leave me not knowing what to think.[0]

Our official car dealer would happily try and charge $50 to refill the windscreen washer fluid during a routine service :) so maybe the actual cost of the battery unit is only part of the story here.

[0] https://electrek.co/2021/12/23/tesla-owner-blows-up-model-s-...

$22k for a Model S battery doesn't sound very wrong to me, but it's going to be almost all materials and not a lot of labor. The battery I mentioned lists for $5500 from Honda, and it is only 17 kW-h. A Tesla has a 50-100 kW-h pack, so I would expect the cost to be proportionately larger, with a slight discount given Tesla's large battery purchasing power.

Apart from that question, most of these are still more expensive than all repairs I've had on a gasoline car in 10 years.

These are not the MSRP prices. These are estimates based on the kWh of each battery.

I can estimate from parts that an iPhone costs $200, but it costs $1000.

So where can I buy EV batteries at those prices? Im interested in 20-30 to start with, Ill send my own lorries to pick them up.

I'm very skeptical it will ever take off: the wear and tear of your high performance, high density, mobility optimized battery that has a unique vendor that tightly controls the spare parts market for maximum profit would be much more expensive then intra-day price differentials of the energy market.

On the long run you are effectively competing against industrial scale storage operations that use exceptionally large infrastructure, optimized for low cost, lower density chemistries (Sodium instead of Lithium), with charge profiles optimized for very high number of daily cycles, or even multiples per day etc.

So even if grid battery storage becomes the main thing stabilizing the renewable grid, it still makes little sense to use your car for that, except in emergencies, a "virtual energy supplier", you are paid for the availability, not the actual delivery.

Really depends on depth of discharge.

A 5x time 20% drain to help the grid isn't anywhere as harmful as a full 100% discharge in emergency mode trying to get to a charging station and not get stranded.

Besides, we could have methods of compensating people for helping stabilize the grid. And of course no one is forcing you to participate in this scheme anyway.

> Besides, we could have methods of compensating people for helping stabilize the grid. And of course no one is forcing you to participate in this scheme anyway.

We don't have profitable methods, so it's moot.

Wouldn't it be great if the grid and the car could negotiate when to charge?

They already can if your car and utility supports it.

There were numerous occasions when hundreds or thousands of cars were stranded on highways during blizzard and exhausted their fuel reserves. It is easy to deliver some fuel when conditions clear. I am curious what it would look like with electric vehicles.

I wonder if we could chain cars together to the nearest power plant, so using the traffic jam itself as the grid.

If they aren’t moving, just running the heater, how long do the batteries last?

Regardless, that’s such an edge case, I’m not sure it needs to be a major part of EV vs ICE calculus. Here in DC, it’s a 1x/decade event, give or take - basically takes a ton of wet snow falling mid-morning, the Fed closing offices early PM, and the entire city tryin to get home that afternoon in one giant mob.

>"Here in DC"

There are many populated places that are not "Here in DC" but still have lot of highways and are further north of DC.

I live in NYS. A blizzard that's bad enough that it strands cars here for any length of time is incredibly rare—because we have the infrastructure to deal with snow.

I would be willing to bet the DC area actually has that happen more often than anywhere else in the US, because it's among the post populated places far enough north that it gets big blizzards from time to time, but far enough south that its snow-removal (and snow-prevention—eg, salting the roads) infrastructure is fairly minimal compared to places that get lots of snow all the time.

True, but DC has a fairly unique mix of… - daytime temperatures that hover around freezing, leading to lots of black ice. - A major employer (US government) with a disdain for WFH arrangements prior to COVID - rare major winter events, so not enough snow removal equipment - crap public transit options (the subway gets stuck in a few inches of snow)

Anybody who works private sector in the area stays home (if they can) when the forecast is for snow. This wasn’t an option for most of the government (including 10s of thousands of .gov contractors). With .gov wide early release when weather hits, icy mix, and crap public transit options, it’s a combination that leads to insane gridlock on the rare occasion we get a true winter storm.

I’m sure there are regions that have one-off traffic. DC gets city-wide gridlock that lasts 8 hours or so if we get more than 8” of snow during a work day.

An electric car with a full charge can run the seat heaters for about a month.

I wish more people understood how much energy it takes to move a car. It's a completely astonishing amount of energy.

He was asking about heaters, not seat warmers. LThey are two different things entirely. Heated seats aren't going to be nearly enough if stuck in a blizzard or whatever.

I'm all for EVs but think hybrids are far more practical for anything other than simple work commutes.

Also, why does everyone assume charging and electricity prices won't surge as soon as the utility companies have enough of the population under their thumb?

Electricity prices will become the new gas prices.

We need to stop this shit at the source and start capping profits.

I said heated seats deliberately. They are much more energy efficient than cabin heaters and will keep you alive during a blizzard. If you're not appropriately dressed they won't keep you comfortable.

And if electricity prices surge then regulators aren't doing their job. The costs of renewable energy have been dropping dramatically and are expected to keep dropping. I do expect the price delta between peak and trough electricity prices to widen dramatically, but mostly due to the price of trough dropping.

I got you.

If you think government regulations will help reign in prices I invite you to look at the Texas power grid price structure it's highway robbery already.

And if the government can't keep current electricity and gas prices under control why should we for a second think they'd do better if we were all driving electric vehicles.

The only pattern I see is to build a moat and use their regulatory capture to raise prices while ignoring infrastructure to the detriment of everyone.

Texas is the cheapest place in the US to charge an EV. Very occasionally it has the most expensive electricity in the US, but most of the time its the cheapest.

The nice thing about an EV is that you can schedule your electricity usage. On average, my EV needs about half an hour of charging daily and is plugged in about 14 hours a day. So I just charge while its cheap and ignore the times when its expensive.

You send the battery truck out. It looks kinda like a tow truck towing a huge battery. It can charge 8 cars at a time. It takes 30 minutes to get 8 cars up to 3kWh. So a 30 vehicle stack up would take 2 hours to clear with just one battery truck. After being stranded for 24 hours, a 2 hour charge delay doesn't seem like a big deal.

Pretty good idea, does that exist yet?

I hope people do not by two car once short range electric car gets cheaper. Electric for short commute and conventional for longer one.

What a strange thought. Why on earth not? Many families have two cars, and having any electric car, over 2 gas cars, seems preferable, yes?

The remaining per-capita carbon budget to avoid > 1.5C climate change is 50 tons. Two new cars could easily consume that entire amount, even if never driven. Replacing the entire vehicle fleet with battery-electric cars is a bad enough idea, but replacing it with twice as many cars is truly unworkable.

Replacing your short-range transport needs with a bicycle, on the other hand, is a great idea.

Per capita budgets don't make much sense to think about that literally I don't feel. We could all be good little beans and meet our individual climate targets and still get fucked by the industrial practices of the bare necessities. We need to materialize the cost of carbon, so that it's felt by industry. We also need to get a wriggle on with research of remediation. I am optimistic that we will pull through, but I don't think it will be because we met our prevention targets.

> Replacing your short-range transport needs with a bicycle, on the other hand, is a great idea.

I don’t disagree, but not every area is what I would consider bicycle friendly. Especially in the US. Nearest grocery to me is 4 miles away. Certainly do able on a bicycle, but unfortunately in this area the roads are not super friendly for bicycles. I’d rather not be run over by a semi full of tomatoes, while going to buy some tomatoes.

It's so site specific, and people make stringent statements based upon their location.

It's not clever, or being insightful, or forward thinking, if it makes no sense.

Try getting groceries on a bike, at -40C and with ice and snow everywhere. Now try it as an octogenarian, or even as a 40 year old in those conditions.

Come on!

People need transportation 12 months a year, not 4 of them! A bike is absolutely, positively not a car replacement in many places, at all, ever, period.

My statment may seem harsh, but I keep seeing all these suggestions which show people only thinking of where they live.

Oh and the hilarious counter suggestion I've heard sometimes. "Don't live there then". What? OK, abandon Canada, and its ability to feed the world with wheat, rye, meat in its summer. Good call, that.

People are going to have to come to a point where they realize that their ridiculous libertarian fantasy of living to old age in a cabin surrounded by glaciers ten miles from anyone else is never going to work. There is no transportation solution to poor land use planning. The fact that this particular fantasy can't work is not an indictment of the bicycle, it is an indictment of the fantasy.

Civilized people live in little clumps called villages, towns, or cities, where the transportation problem is amortized by bringing essential goods such as food by truck to the center of the village where it is within walking distance of even the octogenarians.

I recently got so fed up with the meme that most people live far from other people that I made this visualization of where people live in California. The territory-weighted view of life is completely defective. The overwhelming majority of people live near other people. That some people live far from other people is not important for general commentary or policy. Those few people can do what they like and it's just not important enough to discuss. https://observablehq.com/@jwb/californians-from-oregon-to-me...

California's population is about the same size of Canada's, a country larger than the entire US.

While many people do live in cities, many live in, and outside cities, in rural areas.

Rural areas which support the farms you seem to like. Farms do not live in a vaccuum, and require an entire infrastructure of people working, and living in these areas, including schools, etc.

But outside of this, I noticed you completely glossed over climate as an issue, ignoring inclement weather for most of the year. Your map of warm California is irrelevant here, and does not discuss this.

Canada has very excellent urban planning, and often has grocery stores near by. That only helps at certain times of years, and only helps in dense areas.

This is part of the problem.

Electric cars are an awesome solution, yet what I see always is hard core environmentalists harming positive change. An electric car is far, far better than gas, yea? Is it?

Then holy hell, just drop the blather and embrace it, and be happy change is happening.

Get behind the positive.

We have vegetarians manipulating the climate crisis to get their way (no beef is not bad for the environment), we have the bike/anti-car side doing the same.

You want truth? Here's truth, and you saw it with all the covid political stupidity.

Push too far, and it backfires...

> Push too far, and it backfires...

Ah yes, it always ends in the implicit threat of violence with people like you. Look what you made me do!

Good grief. Reality is reality. And you mentioned violence, not I.

Push back can be an election which reverse years of progress. How do you think Trump got elected?! Pushback.

You want more of that?!? The US left and right... nutjobs one and all!

I kinda feel like cars are a pretty good transportation solution to poor land use planning.

People are going to have to come to a point where they realize that their urban fantasies that everyone wants to live stacked on top of other people just so they will be within walking distance of grocery stores is never going to happen.

They also have to realize that not everyone wants corporate box box stores in their backyards, which in the US is where grocery and household goods are bought.

They also should realize that sometimes desirable places to live can grow faster than infrastructure planning anticipated and nice things like bicycle paths and central shopping areas often aren’t often available that allow safe travel from where the homes are…to where the grocery stores are located by anything other than a care.

> They also have to realize that not everyone wants corporate box box stores in their backyards

Corporate box stores are literally a direct result of suburbanization, if you don’t like them then that’s a argument against the suburbs, not for them.

I wasn’t arguing against them, I was suggesting that folks generally don’t want a 250k sq foot building operating 24 hours a day on a 7 acre patch right outside the back door.

That tends to be why developers avoid putting housing developments right beside them, it’s not really unreasonable IMO.

I get that, its just confusing why you’d connect that with urbanization. Urban environments tend not to have corporate megastores.

Your comment read to me like this “not everyone likes urban environments, people don’t want [insert thing indicative of the suburbs] right on top of them”

Urban places aren’t just more compact versions of the suburbs.

I was not clear then. I was basically taking exception to the comment above that seemed to grip about the lack of walkability of suburban and rural communities and how they were not optimal communities. Some folks just don’t want urban (I don’t). Some folks want suburban (I do) and some folks want rural (not for me).

Suburban tends to be not generally walkable because grocery and retail tend to be on the outskirts and not city center. My comment about big box stores was meant to basically convey that they are not walkable or bicycle friendly because folks in suburban environments don’t want those giant stores that near their homes, but they don’t mind and actually prefer them to be 5-10 by car.

Some neighborhood developers drop quasi downtown main streets now with a few restaurants, boutique shops,etc…but these are not designed to sustain the community around it, but more as a neighborhood perk. Generally are nice enough that nearby homes are not devalued by close proximity the way a large retail or grocery store might be.

I think the OP is talking about single car households becoming two car households just to have one of each.

Fewer cars is better, electric or not.

I wouldn't worry about that. My reasoning is as follows. Electric cars are usually very nice to drive, so people with an ICE and an EV soon discover that they barely use the ICE. And since cars deprecate, I expect they'll feel a definite incentive to drop the ICE.

Of course this is just my personal reasoning. Not supported by data.

I agree, and I am an ICE diehard. I think EVs are the best way forward, but I will keep my ICE project car, I already have it after all, and use it for hobby motorsport.

The daily commuter can be electric. They are just more fit for purpose. I first drove a Nissan Leaf expecting the car to be gimmicky with weird driving characteristics, but it's a incredibly competent feeling car. You immediately notice how much better it is for city driving, in ways you didn't realise your ICE car was deficient in.

Indeed, when you have to stop at a gas station (for the not-yet-electricfied lawnmower) and it's been six months because you have an EV, you are suddenly shocked at how horrendous the smell of gasoline is.

I am originally from a small farm town, less than 5000 people. I remember the first time I came into the city, how vividly the smells hit me. I still get it when I travel out of the city for a while and come back. Cities stink! But you acclimatize so quickly it doesn't matter.

The biology that evolved to tell you that something stinks likely has a positive correlation to how healthy it is for you (delicious stinky cheeses aside).

I actually imagine that electric cars will be even more compelling for long-range — not because batteries will become that much better, but because of a quirk from electric car manufacturers: they care about aerodynamic performance, a lot more than their ICE predecessors. They have to, because of where batteries are.

Because of that, they are now getting close to having cars that can rely on solar panels for some of their energy. It’s not there yet, but there are working prototypes (Aptera is the most inspiring but not the only one). Telsa mentioned a solar roof extension on what sounded like a camper van. Large trucks have a lot of surfaces and would definitely benefit too…

If you look at how much energy has to go in and out, a very conservative drive on a highway has less acceleration per hour, and fewer buildings hiding the sun. You could imagine that a very aerodynamic vehicle driven slowly for long distances would be able to stay charged longer than a gas car.

You might hit limits of human attention (I think we did that a long time ago) so it might not be as beneficial as frequent high-speed chargers, but all that innovation tells me there’s more than a short commute and a disappointing aesthetic to switching to electric.

Solar panels on car roofs just doesn't work. Trucks either. The surface area is small, the access to sunlight is hard to manage, the maintenance is funky, etc.

https://aptera.us

https://lightyear.one

https://sonomotors.com/en/sion/

Are these supposed to be convincing examples of successful products?

The amount of solar power hitting the surface of a car is much, much smaller than the power driving the wheels.

No, no, and no. Aptera is a scam that went bankrupt twice now, and is owned by some Chinese company at this point. Every single EV with solar panels was either scam or a marketing gimmick.

Long range with fast-charging EVs isn't such a big deal. You have infinite range if you can do 20-30 minutes of charging per 2-3 hours of driving. If you're not doing a piss-in-a-bottle cannonball run, it's an entirely reasonable pace that you can adjust to.

We did a 3000km trip in an EV. We only spent 15 minutes total waiting on charging. All other charges were done during bathroom, eating or sleeping breaks.

Much sooner than you expect cities will ban IC cars from downtowns. Not long after that EV's with a width of more than half a lane will be banned or taxed. This will effectively double the capacities of city cores at no cost. Few cities will resist.

I was talking with an electrician about electric cars and he said the neighborhood/city electric grids aren't prepared for everyone to come home at 5 and plug in their cars. Thinking in terms of bandwidth, each neighborhood's circuit is woefully oversubscribed and the thought of a house pulling a ton of current to charge a vehicle was not planned for.

The US is at least 20 years away from ~70% of cars being electric.

In that time, ~50% of people could be either not commuting or commuting in some other way than by car.

That gives the power grid plenty of time to adapt.

I agree. The problem is people are pushing electric cars as a solution to today's gas prices, not gas prices in future decades. Even if they could be manufactured, even if people could afford them, the grid would need some work to accommodate them. That isn't "big oil propaganda"

That’s nonsense and mostly a big oil talking point. In the south every single home has at least one large A/C unit, most of which draw the amount or more as an electric car being charged and yet the grid doesn’t fall over when it’s noon and everyone’s air conditioning is running full blast during the summer. This is like that old fable about the English power companies having to fire up peaker plants during the commercial breaks of soccer games because of so many people putting the kettle on.

Further, most electric car owners I know charge at night when the grid usually has excess capacity. I personally am on a time of use plan where I get free charging from midnight to 3AM, and that’s the window in which I charge my electric cars every day.

Yeah, it's basically a software update to the cars, and suddenly the cars are only pulling from the grid at 4am based on the average spot price of electricity.

I think the biggest issue is that if nobody charges during the day, and all the energy is coming from solar, demand for energy during the night will skyrocket.

But that's solvable by literally putting some power plugs into parking spaces.

Not a huge ask.

> In the south every single home has at least one large A/C unit, most of which draw the amount or more as an electric car being charged and yet the grid doesn’t fall over when it’s noon and everyone’s air conditioning is running full blast during the summer.

Texas has had grid problems because of this. It was especially bad in the winter.

> This is like that old fable about the English power companies having to fire up peaker plants during the commercial breaks of soccer games because of so many people putting the kettle on.

This isn't a fable, I've seen interviews with National Grid staff where they talk about tracking the TV schedule. This is one of the reasons why we have pumped-hydro capacity, to handle quick spikes.

I think this issue may end up being less of an issue than the doomsayers go on about. When I looked into this in ~2012 the solution was going to be "smart grids" where components would collaborate. Now, we've pretty much got there with electric cars being relatively smart, energy pricing being quite dynamic on some tariffs, and smart meters understanding that relationship.

That sounds like a Texas underinvesting in the grid problem

Yes. A few hours driving East, and the only power outage I had in Louisiana were related to weather even.

I think the comparison the other poster make is useful. If Louisiana small town can handle AC usage, they should be able to handle charging EV.

Texas had grid problems because of the natural gas demand was off the charts, along with peaker plants being offline, renewables being offline, and a perfect storm of other issues during an unusually cold spell . I assure you it wasn’t from people running their air conditioning during a freeze.

It happened because they assumed that high demand and gas plants being offline, would be independent events. It turns out if it's very cold people use a lot of power to heat their homes and gas plants can develop issues due to the cold.

Renewables weren't a major contributing factor in the winter outage.

> I assure you it wasn’t from people running their air conditioning during a freeze.

I think conversation is best if you don't assume the other person is an idiot.

If A/Cs draw the same amount electric cars do then everyone switching to electric cars could double or triple (most households have two working parents) the power draw during parts of the day (around 5 when it's the hottest and everyone is coming home from work.)

People aren't going to have the vehicles charge at 3:00 AM, they don't like managing automatons like that. I grew up in a family where our ISP did something similar and I was the only one who would schedule downloads to start at midnight (including my dad who worked as a software dev at a large tech company.) They'll just suffer whatever consequences of having the thing charge when they plug it in are.

I like electric vehicles, I'm actually in the process of upgrading my boat to use electric propulsion. I think a lot of people overlook many of the downsides though and it's a bit concerning. The battery situation is particularly bad, the used electric vehicle market is going to look very different than the used ICE vehicle market.

If every car needs a daily high speed charge for their 20 mile average commute on a 200 mile range car.

- daily vs nightly is important as grid capacity increases as commercial use decreases down by 7pm

- high speed charging is important because if either car will be parked for 12 hours it will be better for the grid and batteries if it uses low speed charging

- if electric cars (and hvacs) have no "time of use" functionality to reduce usage during peak billing rates.

Yea I imagine it’s not difficult to have a system where the charging station at your house gets the real-time cost of electricity and honors and system where you pay the lowest if you charge cooperatively. Don’t need to fill the battery every day? Skip today, get a better price tomorrow. Absolutely need to charge full throttle right now? The price just went up.

Xcel energy has that. They'll pay you to only charge on off peak hours and it's completely automatic

First: stop muddying the waters by accusing people of shilling for big oil. That's explicitly against the guidelines here. Now for the substance of the reply.

It's not a fable, it has its own Wikpedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup.

The US doesn't consist entirely of the South, and guess what? The South is buying some of that AC power from the North. The Eastern Interconnect is a lovely thing, don't get me wrong, but you can't just handwave off the effect of some 20-40 million 9 to 5ers in the Eastern time zone getting home at the same time and plugging their cars in.

It is a solvable problem, most of those cars need to charge for ~90 minutes any time before the morning, but it will be a serious problem if it isn't addressed.

Why are you comparing today to the future state?

Yes, there are literally grid issues right now, with electric cars being a tiny portion of car sales. We will get there but its not necessarily cheap and easy.

"Big oil talking point". You people are brainwashed into believing everything is a conspiracy.

Imagine believing you and the 2% of EV owners are on to something by charging at night, and it'll look the same at 20%+ EV market share.

> Yes, there are literally grid issues right now, with electric cars being a tiny portion of car sales.

Where is this being caused by EVs?

The English tv-related power spikes thing isn't a myth, but it's also not as huge a thing thanks in part to streaming.

The reason the peaker plants aren't the first step is that they take up to ~30 mins-1 hour to spin up. They use hydro or imported power from France to cover until the plants can cover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

Just FYI, I live in the humid mid-Atlantic region of the US. My 2500sqft house has a 2-ton conventional AC system that draws about 1.5-1.7kW at full power. My Model 3 long range draws about 11kW while charging off of the Tesla Wall Connector (48A 240V, 60A breaker).

I live in Houston with a 3500 sqft house and 8 tons which pulls about 6-8kw at peak load.

> every single home has at least one large A/C unit, most of which draw the amount or more as an electric car being charged and yet the grid doesn’t fall over when it’s noon and everyone’s air conditioning is running full blast during the summer

It does in California

We get paid by the electric company to power our farm with our 80kw diesel generator on hot afternoons in Kansas, precisely because of the high demand during that time.

We've run the numbers, and it actually does pay for us to do it.

This afternoon was one of those days.

> aren't prepared for everyone to come home at 5 and plug in their cars.

200 mile range cars and 20 mile average commutes make this not a necessity. The need to use fast charging even less, as slow charging from 5pm-5am provides more than enough miles for the average commute.

I wonder what your electrician thinks about HVAC systems? They all do turn on at roughly the same time (a top cause of brownouts in under prepared grids), don't have a slow charging equivalent (they even depend on large capacitors to start the compressors). The even worse case is a house with multiple heat pumps and auxiliary heating.

Or what does your electrician think about hot water heaters? Fast charging requires similar supply as every house coming home and taking a shower at 5pm.

Or, perhaps the most likely, every house starting the oven at 5pm, the stove, The microwave, With some hot water.

What about all of these combined?

Information; on circuit breaker size required

Low speed charger 120x15amp

Highest speed residential charger: 240x40amp

Water heater 240x30amp

Instant whole house hot water heater 240x40

HVAC 240x30

Aux heat 240x30

Stove 240x30

Oven 240x30

Microwave 120x15

I think the parents post is claiming that the grid isn’t able to handle the additional load of charging everyone’s car at the same time on top of the stoves etc that you mention. It will be in addition to not instead.

Not only is it a solved problem (Tesla, grid.io, ecobee, nest have time of use, if not community savings) but it is solved by electric car batteries preferring slow charge, electric cars having range beyond daily commutes, some people charging their cars at commercial connections some of the time, and everybody not having the exact same schedule.

All teslas besides the SR Model 3 charge at 48A. At home with the Tesla wall connector, it’s a 240V charger, so roughly 11k watts, and they recommend a 60A breaker.

All Teslas will charge at whatever rate the EVSE says it's rated for. If you have a 36A EVSE it'll pull 36A. You don't have to have it set to 48A, you don't need a 60A circuit to charge a Tesla.

Yes you are correct. I guess I was just stating that it can pull up to 48A, which can be a lot higher than most other appliances in a home.

> (they even depend on large capacitors to start the compressors).

Those are starting caps and have nothing to do with energy storage. The caps cause a lagging in the voltage to cause a phase shift in the starting winding relative to the running winding which gets the rotor spinning. Once it gets up to speed it disengages.

What I see are lots of people comparing charging loads to existing appliances but not the fact they these loads are in ADDITION. So we are still facing a large increase in electrical load.

> these loads are in ADDITION.

If, every household drives 200 miles a day

If, those households fast charge at home instead of the commercial charging network that popular commercial entities have been installing (malls, gas stations, supercharger network)

If the lithium ion batteries are fast charging with no pausing.

If the modern electric car (or HVAC) doesn't pay attention to the rate plan that is based on grid capacity (they do)

Tldr; If everybody connected to the same substation gets home at precisely the same time from a 200+ mile road trip, while the day is at its hottest, preheats the oven, takes a shower, and manually turns down their dumb thermostat, and schedules their car to rapid charge to drive another 200 miles in a few hours, Then yes, the grid and individual house would have major problems. But this is obviously a straw man.

There are starting capacitors and running capacitors; the start ones do provide "storage" for initial energizing of the compressor. Yes, the starting one does disengage after start.

But, if we're arguing the semantics of HVAC, we should also argue the semantics of car chargers. They don't jump straight to fast charging on plug-in. They negotiate with the car, checking battery levels, first cooling the battery pack, then, chooses between fast charge and slow charge based on state of the batteries (and optional user input), it also checks with your utility rate plan to see if it's optimal to charge.

> There are starting capacitors and running capacitors;

Not all single phase motors are cap start/run motors.

> the start ones do provide "storage" for initial energizing of the compressor.

No, they are phase shifting.

I guess everyone has a pump station at home right? This is a false argument given that electric chargers are so much easier to install and convenient to use. I don't think anyone takes it seriously

This! The top 10% of use cases (high mileage a day) have incentive to use substation (or at least commercial) charging stations. Many utilities are installing chargers at major brand gas stations.

No offense to the electrician you talked with, but they are ill-informed. Electric grids have been planning for the shift to EVs for years. This isn't a surprise to them. This is what they do all day.

In the UK for example, the Nation Grid reports that grid-source electricity use peaked in 2002 and has fallen 16% since then (due to increased solar panel installations, etc). If all cars switched to electric overnight with no time for additional planning, grid-source electricity use would increase 10%, still under 2002 numbers and still well within manageable limits. [1] But obviously in a real-world scenario, they have plans to better handle the pace of adoption more intelligently than that.

It is true that everyone charging at full speed simultaneously at 5pm would be an issue. So that's why every car sold is smart enough to charge when rates are cheap and skip charging during peak hours. This is further incentivized by fluctuating power prices. People vote with their wallet and if they can get the same result (a fully charged car) for half price or less, they are certainly going to skip charing during peak hours unless they are on empty.

I think people who haven't owned an electric car are imaging how home charging works in the wrong way. Most people don't need to supercharge their car every night at 5pm to fill up the battery from empty to full by 5:30pm. Most of the time, your car has lots of power left after a normal commute and you just plug it in when you park so it is full again tomorrow. It doesn't matter what time during the night it charges and the car will figure it out. It's just not a big deal.

[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/5-m...

Electric cars support 'charging schedules' - my utility gives me discounted electricity to charge between midnight and 8AM, and it took about 5 minutes to setup. I plug in my car when I get home from work, and it happily sits there until midnight when it starts charging (and when the grid is otherwise unstressed).

Don't downvote this one! There's a bunch of issues on this that are hard to judge. The obvious one is power availability. Likely solveable, but not trivial. The non obvious one is the grid itself. A lot of grid systems are overloaded already. And this is fine. They run hot during the day, they cool off at night, and by morning they're good to go. Electric vehicles demand a lot of power. Even if you're doing it at night, it's going to add a lot of heat to the system. It's going to be an expensive and difficult thing to solve if transformers start dropping like flies during a heatwave.

This article covers major issues:

Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/02/09/limits-to-green-energy...

[1] It is becoming clear that intermittent wind and solar cannot be counted on to provide adequate electricity supply when the electrical distribution system needs them.

2] Adequate storage for electricity is not feasible in any reasonable timeframe. This means that if cold countries are not to “freeze in the dark” during winter, fossil fuel backup is likely to be needed for many years in the future.

3) After many years of subsidies and mandates, today’s green electricity is only a tiny fraction of what is needed to keep our current economy operating.

[4] Even as a percentage of electricity, rather than total energy, renewables still comprised a relatively small share in 2020.

5] Most modelers have not understood that reserve to production ratios greatly overstate the amount of fossil fuels and other minerals that the economy will be able to extract.

6] The world economy seems already to be reaching limits on the extraction of coal and natural gas to be used for balancing electricity provided by intermittent renewables.

7] Conclusion. Modelers and leaders everywhere have had a basic misunderstanding of how the economy operates and what limits we are up against. This misunderstanding has allowed scientists to put together models that are far from the situation we are actually facing.

Thanks for this article, it’s refreshing to read an article that is pragmatic about the topic.

There are MANY mistakes here.

Offshore wind especially in the north sea is barely tapped and powerful all year round. There are many other constant green energy options such as hydro, waves, currents, geothermal, etc. The value is in including a wide variety of all and over a large enough territory so surplus in one area can compensate a shortfall in another.

Grid energy storage includes MANY creative and easy to implement ideas. Tesla style batteries are the most mundane. The cost and setup of grid scale storage is much lower than the alternative.

Nobody is refuting that there are not alternatives & solutions. Each of the pts are supported. It’s the shear scale of replacing conventional energy & we haven’t really dented its use.

This is from today’s James Kunstler blog:

The solar electric I installed on the house nine years ago is down. It’s supposed to feed that monster called the grid. Since April, I noticed that the electric bill is creeping up way beyond the usual seventeen bucks that the electric company charges home solar producers for the privilege of feeding their system — which, let’s face it, has a downside for them because the intermittency of so-called alt-energy disorders their operations.

Sure. But the limits are very far off, the main problem is replacing 150+ years of energy infrastructure. Green needs large buildups a solar roof is a "nice hobby" but we need massive scale. To get to this point we need a lot of government investment like never before.

It is doable though and not as out of reach (from a major percentage) as some people would say. Green is already far more affordable than any alternative including fossil and nuclear. That was a very hard part. Getting it to scale is the second challenge and it's moving, right now funds and supply chain issues are the blockers.

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