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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

You're right, we'll need about 20% more electricity if we replaced all our ICE cars with electric ones. If we stop selling gas cars in 2035 then by about 2045 we'll hit ~99% electric cars.

Are you implying we can't increase our infrastructure by 20% in 20 years?

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What's involved in increasing electricity infrastructure by 20%? Have you looked at the timeline of some large scale, coordinated effort public infrastructure projects?

One that's close to home for me is the Seattle area's light rail system. Voters approved a plan that includes an extension of the line from downtown Seattle to the neighborhood I live in sometime around 2016. Service is now scheduled to start in 2039, but there have already been multiple delays.

Interconnect backlog queue is limiting factor, and it's five years.

There are currently enough projects in the queue to double our generating capacity.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...

2016 means you're talking about ST3, and 2039 means you're talking about Ballard [1]. It looks like the date in ST3 for Ballard was originally 2038 [2], so it doesn't seem delayed that much *yet*.

That said, I'm not sure large-scale transit projects are too comparable to electric infrastructure. The ST1 project had a lot of delays due to disagreements about where the rail line would go, and the cost of purchasing land [3]. It's a system designed to move people to places, so a lot of people have opinions on which places the system should go. By contrast, people mostly care that enough electricity is getting delivered to where they live, and don't really care how it gets there.

[1] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sou...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Link_light_rail

We can't even provide for the current needs on a cold or hot day… I'm not "implying" anything, I just notice the continuous blackouts in summer and in cold winter days.

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