What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep
blog.opower.com
blog.opower.com
It would be more interesting then to compare EV owners against non-EV owners in a similar income bracket (or household size, or assumed wealth, or somesuch grouping). I wonder how the picture would change?
Likewise, when the article introduces solar comparisons, it runs into the same problems. I'd guess that the households with solar panels are again likely to be wealthier, and so much less likely to be a 'typical household'.
To be fair to the author, I think that they actually can't do the more detailed comparisons because they just don't know enough about the households in the study. At the end of the page, it explains that they don't even know whether or not the households actually have EVs, they are just guessing based upon their electricity plan. So despite the earlier talk of stats like "53% more likely to have a swimming pool", I suspect that this is gleaned from elsewhere and their dataset contains very little about the customers, and probably not enough to be able to break them down by income or other factors.
Of course, but being more efficient isn't the same as having a smaller overall footprint. The point is that wealthy customers probably have bigger houses that require more energy to heat and cool in absolute terms, even if it's done more efficiently relative to poorer folks.
Instead of pumping out CO2 in our cities, the CO2 is pumped out at the electricity plants - making our cities cleaner and safer to live in. :)
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/mpg-for-electric...
"From a carbon-dioxide standpoint, you’d be better off burning the fossil fuel directly in your car."
I would love to see this chart and the projection of how it would be shaped if 50% / 75% / 100% of cars on the road were electric: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16511&src=Tot...
What happens when you shift the energy requirements from transportation to residential? What happens when you shift from high yield energy (gasoline) to low yield energy (coal)?
Actually, it still helps a lot, because burning fuel at power plants is much, much more energy efficient than in internal combustion engines (I think I saw a factor of 3 or 4 in some analysis). So by going all electric, you get 3 times less pollution for the same number of cars (actually, you'd get even less, because power plants are better at filtering pollutants).
Also another added benefit is that the moment you go green by e.g. switching to nuclear power, suddenly all your cars get their carbon footprint cut down by two orders of magnitude.
You are right in that electric cars only relocate the pollution and energy consumption, but it still has to happen somewhere.
By moving this source of pollution out of the cities to an unpopulated location you're saving the health of millions of people.
I own a Prius. I don't care about being "green". (I'm not some "drill, baby, drill" wacko, but I do think that saving the environment is a collective action problem to the extent that "doing my part" won't make any real difference.) I bought it because it's a really nice car, the price was right, and I really enjoy infrequent, cheap visits to the gas station.
Similarly, I'd love to own a Tesla, not to be "green", but because they're really nice cars and I enjoy the thought of never buying a gallon of gasoline again, even though I know it won't save me money over the Prius unless gas goes up to about $500/gallon.
I don't think I'm very wasteful in my life as a whole, either. I believe my house is smaller than average for my area and the size of my family, although I wouldn't call it "small". We use public transportation a lot, and specifically moved near a Metro station for that. We have lots of LED and CFL bulbs. High efficiency equipment keeps my electric and gas usage down. But I do all of this to save money, not to placate my inner Greenpeace. And if you want to bring large-scale change, that's the angle to push on. "Save money," not "save the planet."
However, during an unproductive daydream session, I realized that my solar panels would produce electricity during the exact hours that my car would be parked at work. In fact, during peak solar hours, my house uses very little energy at all.
Reverse meter billing would perhaps net out the cost of energy used at night with the energy produced during the day -- but I'm fairly certain by the time I get around to doing all this our utility will have implemented demand-based pricing on electricity, making it fairly cheap to charge your car at night.
It's what I'll be putting on the roof of my Round The World 4x4.
To actually run your car on sunshine, you'd need a battery system at home. But battery charging losses are greater than the local electrical grid. So it's most practical to use the electricity from the panels at the time of generation and nearby.
Here in Sacramento, SMUD, the local utility, has a "solar shares" program, where you buy into a solar farm nearby. It costs a little more year round, but it evens out your bills all year. You get credits for "your" solar panel generation, and you get to increase demand for solar, there are no installation costs, and no maintenance.
I think utilities are reluctant to give you time-based billing when you have solar in place. They don't want to pay you peak- or ultra-peak-rates for your solar power.
Possible solutions:
1. Buy an extra Tesla battery and swap the batteries in the evening when you get home from work. I know this isn't presently practical [EDIT: at home without special equipment], but the idea of swapping electric car batteries is being discussed for the future, to avoid long charging times.
2. Buy an exotic and very efficient home battery bank to store the daylight solar energy until it can be delivered (as charging current) to the Tesla after dark.
3. Shame your employer into installing a solar changing station at your place of work. Emphasize the terrific public relations advantage, don't mention the cost.
Your suggestion of feeding the grid is by far the most practical approach, because it's already an option in many places.
It may not be practical to do at home but Tesla has already demonstrated automatic battery swapping on their Model S. They've timed it at twice as fast as filling up a comparable luxury gas car:
It had to be planned. I don't think it was feasible in the roadster because of the battery placement. But the model S has a nice flat battery on the bottom of the car, making for great weight distribution and easy access. I haven't seen any news of any actual swap stations though.
Also, I don't think that battery lifetimes can be stated with such certainty yet. Few electric cars have been running long enough to know just how the batteries age with that usage. About the closest available is the fleet of older Priuses that are hitting a decade or more on the road, and they seem to have occasional failures but not the consistent aging that's been predicted... but of course they use the battery completely differently, and capacity is less important.
California appears to be phasing out that requirement (ability to swap the pack), which is why battery swap stations are no longer being pursued aggressively.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/05/business/la-fi-elect...
http://gas2.org/2014/07/02/ev-battery-swap-stations-may-be-a...
I mean, of course EEV household consume more electricity, and of course they are parked at night...and that happens to be cheap electricity hours.
Based on the figure of 9 Kwh to charge the Tesla, this is less than 1 gallon of gas. Pretty efficient.
“They are using gobs of electricity.” What? The observation (that EV car households use about 6kWh or under $1 of electricity above a normal household per night) is if anything remarkable for how low it is. Does the average owner of a new electric car drive only 16 miles per day? More likely, a large part of the daytime use is also spent charging the car. But the average daytime use is only 3kWh above normal. 9kWh only gets you 24 miles per day or about 9000 miles per year, still below the national average driven per year. If I bought an EV vehicle, I would drive it as much as possible, since it only costs 1/3 what a normal car does to operate.
The hypothesis that “EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities” is plausible, but from the given data the opposite could be true instead; they may spend all their extra electricity charging their vehicle and spending less electricity on their other appliances.
Also, why mention Tesla multiple times (and in the title), when far more Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts have been sold and are part of the data?
The automobile was all fine and dandy when only in the hands of the wealthy, but drastically changed the landscape of the country when adopted by the masses. Will there be any serious structural problems if this happens with the electric vehicle?
And really, the aluminum smelters was just one example. As the nightly price equalized with the daily price, all electricity would begin getting more expensive, and everything else with it. Much as, in current times, increases in oil price can increase the price of everything.
IOW yes, but no.
In case anyone misses the point: for the past 6 years the ADministration has been dragging it's feet in building new Nuclear power plants that are a lot "greener" than current ones and are obviously way "greener" than coal.
Fukushima killed the political climate for nuclear. Obama had proposed $54 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear plants[1]. No one in Congress was going to vote for that with a nuclear meltdown in the news.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-14/obama-s-nuclear-pow...
Since washing machines are one of the biggest consumption devices in our house, and we spend most of the day out anyway, it saves us some money. We just need to program the machines to wash at night.
On the residential side though, our utitly (Xcel Energy in MN), has a rate reduction program where they installed a power cycling device on our central AC unit that shuts it off for 10 minutes every hour.
You're still not paying the real-time prices of electricity, for which the purpose is to balance supply and demand.
The pricing systems seem to be designed to be easily understood rather than completely practical.
As a result, the price may jump every day at 5PM, and then go back down at 10PM. But I fear we'll eventually see a time where HVAC/dryers/fridges/etc turn on full blast at 4:30PM and stop entirely at 5PM, then turn on again right at 10PM, leading to grid instability due to the sudden change in usage at exactly one point in time.
If you know it's going to happen and you have a decent grid you can manage. The UK supposedly has a 3GW spike in power draw every time the BBC's soap opera goes to comercial. That's a sizable chunk of total power in an island grid that doesn't have the rest of Europe backing it up.
http://www.geek.com/news/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predicta...
You're right that the increasing number of grid-connected devices could lead to problems like this, especially as more and more appliance makers start to add this ability. At the moment I've seen grid-enabled devices used to back down on electricity use during peak times. ComEd offers a GSM-connected box to modulate your A/C compressor during brownout times.
But I've tinkered with a thermostat that superchills my house when the price dives into low or negative space. I guess I never thought about what could happen when 1,000,000 homes do the same thing. Law of unintended consequences I guess.
Headline: Consumers use plan they signed up for to expected effect
"Rich people who can buy expensive cars are also likely to have swimming pools and use more electricity, unless they have solar panels on their big houses."
In 20 years, the same section of the press will be running with:
"Rich people are less greedy than poor people because they have more room on their expansive homes for solar panels. Now here's some photos of their kitchen."
So the headline here is: people who pick power plans which are cheaper only if you use lots of energy at night will use lots of energy at night.
Once you strip out all the fluff around it, this isn't telling us anything at all whatsoever about EV usage.
> People are more likely to be home in the morning and evening; EV owners may be especially likely to use more power at those times because they have bigger homes as well as bigger amenities
In other words, it's important to note that this is by no means an "all (other) things being equal" comparison to start with.
There's normally a 2 hour lead time to bring larger plants on line so provided you can predict changes in demand with that much lead, there's no real problem.
Perhaps electric vehicle owners are in a higher income bracket and have larger houses.