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The power grid will be roughly the same in 15 years. Now, know what the "TV pickup" is? - It's a spike in electrical grid demand when everyone turns on a kettle to make tea during commercial breaks.

So, consider EVs adopted at scale, and, like, there's an apartment building with 100 tenants arriving home in the evening. They start charging their cars. That would require 7.2kW x 100 = 720kW of power (a common max for charging stations) for a single building just to charge cars.

So?

The power companies makes money by delivering electricity. This sounds like a problem they want to solve.

Power companies have a monopoly and make money by doing the least amount of work possible to continue collecting (effectively) rent on the lines they own. The kind of capital investment necessary to upgrade the power grid for EV will require public funding.

Public funding you say? For infrastructure? Wasn't there some sort of thing the US President did at the end of 2021? For like a trillion dollars?

Gee, its almost like a private company is a useless middleman in cases like this and the government should just do it themselves.

Why do you think the government would do a better job? Perhaps in other countries, but in the US, the government is largely seen as incompetent at best, corrupt and captured at worst.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/06/m-16-a-...

This was during a war where lives were at stake.

The government can be held accountable directly. A corporation with a monopoly can only be held accountable via the government.

>The government can be held accountable directly.

By whom, itself?

By the people who vote for it.

Let me turn this around: who holds a monopoly corporation accountable? If your government is too corrupt to fix, what hope in hell does a corporation running a utility get you?

I don't think either is held accountable. Who was held accountable for Flynt? Who was held accountable for East Palestine? Usually, the only people held accountable are citizens when they make even the slightest mistake.

Ok, so my statement that a monopoly corporation is a useless middleman and the we're better off if the government does it because at least they're one fewer link in the chain is negated by neither being very good, so we do nothing.

And we wonder why shit sucks in this country.

The government and large corporations are parts of the same machine. The corporations fund the campaigns of the elected government officials and in turn, they pass legislation favorable to the corporations. The legislation is often written by the lawyers of those very corporations. Further, the bureaucrats who head the government agencies responsible for regulating the corporations are often hired by those very corporations after their tenure.

The only way out is to vote out the incumbent every election until we get the government we want. If and when we actually start doing this, it will probably take at least a generation because so many people are largely ok with it, or too busy surviving to pay attention.

Sorry to paint such an unpleasant picture, but it's what it is. I'm optimistic because people are starting to wake up to it quite a bit.

None of which invalidates my original statement that the situation in which a monopoly corporation controls a utility is strictly worse than the government controlling it directly because at least there is one less layer of indirection.

Can you give some examples where this is the case?

....it doesn't require examples, it is simple logic.

I assert that:

1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.

2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.

Therefore, if the people wish to hold the operators of a utility accountable then having a monopoly control that utility is only introducing an extra, unnecessary, layer.

As far as I can tell, you make no claim that contradicts 1 or 2. You are, at best, saying that in practice having a monopoly run things is no worse than having the government do it directly. Feel free to correct my assessment.

So your argument would be stronger if you cited examples. I assume since you aren't you're arguing from a strictly theoretical / academic sense. If we're going to go that route:

  1) A monopoly can only be held accountable by the government.

This is not true. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the shareholders. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the market. Ask any cable company, for example. A monopoly can also be held accountable by new entrants to the market, ask any ISP that refuses to run lines to rural areas.

  2) The government can only be held accountable by the people.

From a strictly academic sense, this is true, but requires an election to achieve, and I've already gone over how those are captured by the very corporations governments are supposed to hold accountable. 88% of the population supports medical marijuana legalization, but it's still illegal at the federal level. Where's the government accountability there?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/22/americans-o...

> This is not true. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the shareholders. A monopoly can also be held accountable by the market. Ask any cable company, for example.

The monopolies in question are utility monopolies, none of these apply except the shareholder control, the holding accountable of which is equivalent to holding the company itself accountable.

> A monopoly can also be held accountable by new entrants to the market, ask any ISP that refuses to run lines to rural areas.

Considering the state of rural internet access in the US, that doesn't seem to be supporting your argument at all. And when ISPs have local monopolies their service is measurably much more expensive and worse than when there is competition, and also measurably worse that municipally run connectivity, which they fight tooth and nail.

> From a strictly academic sense, this is true, but requires an election to achieve, and I've already gone over how those are captured by the very corporations governments are supposed to hold accountable.

As I said, even given this the situation with the government alone running things is only as bad as it is with the monopoly middleman while remaining potentially easier to change.

>will require public funding.

Truly astounding that you acknowledge that the power companies are (at this point) just rent-seeking monopolists, and your response is "Gosh, I guess we'll just have to subsidize them with a massive corporate welfare check! No other options are possible!"

We've seen this game play out with telecom before. Spoiler: the monopolists just pocket the money and don't build the infrastructure.

This is a simplistic view and it’s a problem that many businesses on many sectors face.

That's a solved problem - just combine a smart meter with a charger and you can adjust the power so that it doesn't make the peak worse.

For most of the night electricity usage is considerably lower than during the evening peak.

Very true, and it's a well understood problem. For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight (not the least being that solar works better during the day, helping to mooting nightly storage concerns), and so an ideal situation here is that many or even most of those charged during the day at work.

There's a lot of possibilities here though. With smart meters and cars hooked up all night, the power company has a lot of freedom to not just 100% every car instantly, but throttle and prioritize as necessary.

> For a variety of reasons it is better to charge during the day than overnight

This was one of the examples given in the article - the answer on whether it's better to charge at night or during the day varies by who you ask.

Solar does work better when the sun is out, but what if your area isn't using solar power? Air conditioner use peaks when the sun is out, what is your area uses much of its electrical capacity during daylight hours on HVAC?

The answer always ends up at "it depends"

There were very similar concerns about mobile bandwidth not long after the iPhone came out. Mobile carriers just built like crazy and handled it. No reason power companies can’t do the same thing.

> No reason power companies can’t do the same thing.

Nuclear power plants take over a decade - best case - to build.

But gas turbine power plants can take under a year to come online; even less when an existing plant expands capacity. Yeah, they still emit CO2, but it's a quick and cheap stop gap while waiting on green energy to replace them.

It should be noted that the USA has a refining crisis looming. Our refinement capacity is stagnant/shrinking and it's substantially more difficult to build refineries than it is to build electricity generation. This is largely a problem that's "by design" that will act as the stick, if the carrots for the EV transition don't work. We basically have an artificial cap on the number of ICE vehicles that can be supplied with gasoline unless something changes.

It took wireless network providers over a decade to build out their capacity too. In fact they are still building today.

This is not much power, and all cars support scheduled/delayed overnight charging already. There are cars that support V2G and can be made to even supply power to the grid for that TV pickup peak if necessary. BEVs have batteries large enough that they're fine even if they're not plugged in for several days.

Slow AC charging is little more than a kettle + electric oven, and we built the grid for that instead of lamenting it's too much for the grid and people need to continue to use wood stoves. Driving 40 miles (US daily average) uses about 10-12kWh of electricity, and there's whole night to refill that.

Why would I do that when it costs more to charge at that time due to higher demand. Indeed I'll drain from my house battery back to the grid at that time to make a little on the side and charge from midnight for far less cost.

Assuming it's for overnight charging, I would guess a large apartment complex that offers an EV charging hub might like to install some sort of load balancing/switching mechanism to limit how much total draw. It doesn't take the full evening to charge a car, so it would sequence where to deliver the power.

Most people don't drive that much in a day. For a typical EV user nightly charging isn't even really necessary, they're probably only needing to charge once every 3 days or so so it won't take that much to top-up if they're doing it nightly. If it's a small enough building tenants might be okay with doing a sort of sign-in system to use a smaller bank of chargers when needed. Sort of like reserving a treadmill at the gym.

> Norway is largely there regarding transitioning, despite having a cold climate. Took less than 15 years and their grid didn't collapse

[Norway] "Sep 2022: Over 25% of all cars on the road are plug-in electric"[0]

They're just over 1/4 of the way there, I'm not sure I'd call that "largely there".

Persuading people with plenty of money to buy an EV is relatively easy, as one can tell from the tone of the comments here from EV owners, who seem broadly very happy with their vehicles.

Q: How do we propose to persuade the rest of society to switch? Apparently it won't be by throwing cash at the problem if one looks at Germany's take on the issue:

"Germany will reduce financial incentives to buy electric cars next year after an agreement within the governing coalition, as the vehicles' growing popularity makes government subsidies unnecessary, Germany's economy ministry said on Tuesday.

The incentives, or premiums, paid to buyers of electric cars will expire completely once an allocated sum of 3.4 billion euros ($3.44 billion) from the next two years' budget is spent, according to government sources."[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_N... [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/german-coalition-parties-...

Charge petrol users the true costs of their transport choices and there will be no choice but to buy an electric car (or no car at all - especially in cities)

That sounds like a great way to grind the economy to a halt. The folks who are left include the long tail of people who make ~30k in a year.

> Charge petrol users the true costs of their transport choices

Petrol/diesel users still massively outnumber EV users, and [at least in most places] everyone has a vote. Many less well-off voters are way more concerned about their family's immediate needs than they are about the long term future of the planet.

Politicians may be wondering if that's really a wise fight to start? At least, not right now.

Why would you lower the cost of burning fossil fuels? It seems counterproductive.

Separating out the road use taxes like that will have to be done eventually. Is this a "rip off the band aid" approach?

> Separating out the road use taxes like that will have to be done eventually

Across Europe, "fuel taxes vary greatly [...] [taxes account] for 65-80% of unleaded petrol price and 60-80% of diesel prices"[0]

All those [EDIT: hundreds of] billions raised from the sale of petrol and diesel is going to have to be found somewhere else instead.

Taxing electricity more, or taxing charging - or driving - somehow, or by taxing the sale of EVs themselves?

[0] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/ENVISSUENo12/page024....

The things to no longer subsidize would be road use (as part of a land tax) and generated externalities of pollution, including the military and political cost of maintaining a stable oil-producing middle east, the change to the global climate, and more local issues such as oil spills and rubber particulates.

However road users like socialism when it's stuff they want to be subsidized.

Taxing sales directly doesn't make sense - sure recoup the externalities of lithium mining when the manufacturers buy the lithium, but to charge a consumption tax unrelated to damage done doesn't seem much sense to me.

How does food for 8 billion people get grown without fossil fuel inputs for fertilizer? What happens to the other 80% of uses for them?

in the UK this will probably be achieved by a "per-mile" charge registered on vehicle odometers to replace the lost revenue from fuel duty.

That would be far more sensible (perhaps with different amounts based on co2 generation) - especially the crazy vehicle excise duty where two identical cars will pay the same, whether they do 3,000 miles a year or 130,000 miles a year.

But that would be far easier and cheaper than implementing some GPS tracking system in 31 million vehicles, where's the 9-figure contracts that can be given to the mate of a minister?

There are two ways around this: either tax the buy/sale transaction of petrol vehicles, which would severely harm the poor and the ones not living in megacities; or tax the fuel itself, which would make current inflation look like fun and games, as all countries logistics run on fuel.

The proper environmental solution would be going "fuck it, let's do it anyway", yet unfortunately, there is a whole planet outside of Sweden/Norway/Denmark, and they'd be more than happy to burn all of the fuel to pick up the economic opportunities that opened up.

Politics is hard.

Good point not often mentioned. The entire EU could be CO2 neutral by 2030, destroying itself in the process, and yet the net climate impact would be around 0.1C of average temperature reduction by 2100.

The thing with fighting climate change is that it isn't actually an emergency. We're way past that. It is also not a disaster like a flood that would cause damage so abruptly that only preventive measures make sense.

For a human timescale, climate change has been slow to set in and will be slow to slow down. The upswing of that is that we truly have time to adapt. Other species don't, unless we specifically protect them. It's a disaster in slow motion, and like everything else happening in slow motion, we'll outscale it by a large factor.

With human development, our ability to minimize damage from natural disasters vastly outpaces any (experimentally uncertain so far, but should happen according to predictions) growth in the amount and severity of disasters such as hurricanes and droughts.

Well that was a wild tangent. Anyway, main point is, unless all BRICS countries are involved in anti-emissions measures so drastic they will never agree to them, there's nothing that can be done to meaningfully prevent temperatures to climb at least 2C by the end of the century. Sorry, there's geoengineering too but we should also avoid that if possible.

Also we really aren't only talking about BRICS, but all other countries in South America, Africa and Asia as well. With sizable populations who certainly want to increase their quality of living by most means possible.

I think the number of countries ready to limit their increase of living standards if not already high are only those that are truly impacted. For everyone else they will try to find some other way around issues. And probably anyway end up better of than they are now.

Sounds like a great way to make all the EVs travel at a walking pace, as people just walk along the roads that they cannot afford to drive on.

I really believe that would start an actual war in the US. Would not advise attempting this.

The price target for companies like Climeworks is $100/ton for ambient CO2 removal. Assuming that price, it'd be a dollar a gallon. The gas price fluctuates more than that year to year.

That's a lovely target and I'll eat my hat if they get below $300/ton.

Yup. This has always been The Correct Answer™. Since the beginning.

In Norway the electric cars now drive more miles per year than ICE cars, which means if they are 25% of the cars, they account for more than 25% of the miles driven.

And both numbers are increasing.

To be fair, Nokia was the target of a hostile takeover by Microsoft (Steve "developers developers developers developers" Balmer era) in their bid to make Windows 8 touch/small device a thing, then summarily and unceremoniously killed off when Windows 8 mobile failed to take off. Nokia was definitely in decline in the mid 2010s, but it was Microsoft who brought them to their early, untimely death by at least 5 years. I'm still stunned Finland allowed that to happen.

Nokia was slow to the party and competed between Apple and Android. When opportunity offered itself to adopt a third option, Windows Phone, with market monopoly, they took it.

Problem was that a couple of years later Microsoft announced their Windows Tablet, making them a direct competitor with Nokia. Now the organization was stuck with a very bad deal. They took the option of seeking acquisition by Microsoft as the apparent least worst option.

Source: Transforming Nokia by Risto Siilasmaa, Nokia’s Chairman 2012-2020 https://www.paranoid-optimist.com/

The grid argument is especially spurious since the power required for driving is so low. At a typical 10 kWh/100 km that a daily city commuter will draw, with most such cars charged overnight at home, you will add a grand total of 100 kWh to your monthly power bill for 1000 km.

This will cover the great majority of cars and city tips with essentially no grid upgrades. The other part of transport needs - commercial fleets, long distance hauling etc. - will have dedicated charging infrastructure paid for the businesses that operate them, since it will make economic sense for them to switch to electric.

Sorry, 10 kWh at electricity meter for 100 km just does not sound real.

Making a car-shaped electric vehicle is like attaching a GSM module to a rotary phone.

Building future cities around electric scooters, EUCs, etc - yeah, I can see that.

Electric car-shaped objects - not really. The current car-shaped infrastructure will have to change in any case.

There's a Porsche factory in Chile there they make synthetic fuel by synthesizing water and CO2 from air. So it is net zero emission (might even be negative). It costs $40 a gallon now. By 2035 it'll probably cost $2 a gallon.. maybe even mobile synthesizers will be available and we will end up seeing EVs extinct.

It seems far more likely that synthetic fuels will become cheaper than ev cars will become universally useful.

More info for others: https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/porsche-pumps-first-synthe...

... or probably not.

Synthetic fuels are great for airlines which is the only realistic solution for long-distance travels (cryogenic hydrogen containers would be heavier and a significant hazard, batteries are only feasible on shorter routes), but the allure of EV isn't just because it's cleaner but also it's significantly lower maintenance versus an ICE car. Maintaining an ICE car is no joke, and while EVs do still require some maintenance it is only a fraction of ICE vehicles.

Airlines can be turned into blimps. It's the big super-carrier cargo ships that are going to need all of the fuel.

That or we go the aircraft carrier route and make them nukes, which isn't feasible at the scale that international shipping operates.

> Airlines can be turned into blimps.

For cargo, maybe, but I really doubt passengers would accept a significant slowdown on air travel.

I love airships as much as the next person, but it’s really hard to see how they could replace passenger planes.

Won’t journey times be much longer? Where are you going to get the passengers, and all the staff? Where are you going to land them?

Super carrier cargo ships should be nuclear.

I have a Toyota Land Cruiser. It helps to have something super reliable! Understressed gasoline engine. Now I just basically need to maintain it, there are no expensive repairs out of the ordinary. Just servicing oil brakes, suspension, tires etc.

I probably spend under £100 a year maintaining my 25-year-old Range Rover.

Again, super simple engine, massively overengineered drivetrain, cheap and plentiful bits. Plus running it on propane makes it a lot cheaper and cleaner!

IC engines are pretty mature technology by now, and it's amazing how reliable they can be for something that is exposed to the air and houses thousands of explosions per minute.

But electric motors still have an inherent advantage that they have very few moving parts, much lower heat levels, almost no vibration, can be hermetically sealed, don't need complex transmission, etc.

Owned 3 Toyotas, currently a Corolla and a highlander hybrid. Grand total of 100k miles and $130 of repairs on them (battery), apart from regular servicing.

Yeah, those who go Toyota simply can't understand why people even bother with e.g. expensive German cars and such. Even the "Car Wizard" on Hoovies garage realized this recently.

I mean, it's not happening in the near future - but couldn't commercial airlines be powered by SMNR or Fusion?

The 787 has over 200,000 pounds of fuel.

IIUC, SMNR currently can produce ~300MW weighing 1.4M pounds. Naively, it seems reasonable in 30 years or so we could produce one that weighs 140,000 pounds and produces ~30MW (not even a gain, just a smaller reactor) - which could power a current 787. Naively, I imagine they'd have more efficient plane designs in 30 years, too.

And Fusion actually does seem less than 30 years away now. But who knows.

That latter is what really surprised me in 3 years of Model 3. Except to repair a punctured tire, no maintenance yet in over 20,000 miles. They recommend changing the air filters but I did not.

20000 miles is not really enough to judge the reliability of a car.

There are Prius taxis in NY clocking 500k miles or more.

On the other hand Hyundai Veloster is fun to drive but literally breaks down after 30k.

Maintaining ICE is actually not that bad, you just have to pick the right ones. Think Toyota-Honda-Mazda-Subaru.

Synthetic fuel is too expensive, the horrible efficiency of heat engines makes the cost ~5x compared to pure EVs. For long distance air travel and cross ocean shipping, which uses the energy density of organic fuels, it has some applications.

https://simpleflying.com/saf-cost-competitive-jet-fuel/

This doesn't address the issue of non-CO2 pollution. Which is especially bad in large cities.

I don’t think I could comfortably switch to only EV cars. I think I still need a gasoline car with my Tesla. However, both of cars are similar size and mileage. One uses electricity, the other uses premium gas, as a result… round trip from work, one will cost ~$6 dollars in electricity, whereas the other is ~$15 dollars. Plus there are still some trips we do frequently where there are zero charging station for miles so having a gas car does help