Hacker News Reader

Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

The largest impediment to everyone switching over to electric cars, is grid and supply, not storage.

We can do the battery storage right now, it's just not as great as what we'd like.

If you switched all cars over to electric tomorrow, the grid would melt down in every country that attempted it. There is not even remotely enough power available to handle it. Most first world countries are running their national power grids with a very modest buffer (and for countries sub first world, forget about it, they're still dealing with routine rolling blackouts).

By the time all autos are switched to electric in 30 years, hopefully self-driving cars have wiped out at least half of all vehicles in the first world.

View on HN

"If you switched all cars over to electric tomorrow" is not a useful scenario. In reality, the shift will take decades, and that's enough time for changes in the grid to happen.

Of course. The parent said this however:

"From my point of view the only thing that stops us all from switching to electric cars is the battery technology."

My obvious point was that, in fact, that is not even remotely the only thing stopping us from switching to electric cars. My scenario was extremely useful in highlighting the fact that we do not have the capacity to switch to an all-electric car approach, and not primarily due to batteries.

We can do the battery tech and manufacturing in the present, to build very effective electric vehicles. Building up the grid to support ~500 million cars in the first world would cost tens of trillions of dollars and take decades. It makes the battery challenge look hilariously minuscule by comparison.

Huh. Well, the only thing I can suggest is that if you want to say that, that you say that, instead of what you said. Because no, that's not obvious from what you said, and no, people don't agree with your cost estimate. No "of course" involved.

I did in fact say just that, in the comment you replied to I said:

"By the time all autos are switched to electric in 30 years"

You ignored what I said, and proceeded to tell me how the shift will take decades.

What the heck? That was in a different part of your comment ("tomorrow" instead of "in 30 years"), logically unconnected to what I responded to! If you meant it to be connected, then you could have made it clear.

If building up the grid to support 500 million electric cars only costs trillions, it sounds like an order of magnitude easier than the batteries.

Emphasis on tens of trillions and decades (not merely a few trillion).

Batteries are not a $30 trillion and 30 year problem, not even remotely close. Batteries are an order of a magnitude smaller of a problem.

We can build the Tesla S already. Musk is going to spend $5 billion building a plant that can produce 500,000+ car battery systems. We can already make effective battery systems for mainstream electric cars, the challenge now is to make them better and scale up manufacturing (which has already begun).

It costs $5 billion in the US just to build one major nuclear power plant.

I rarely see anybody discussing where the trillions of dollars in new spending is going to come from to boost energy supply and grid to handle 100 million electric cars in the US. It'll cost trillions just to maintain what we already have now over that time.

Right now, batteries for a realistic replacement car (not a compromise EV like a Leaf) cost about $20,000 per vehicle. That's $10 trillion for 500 million cars. It doesn't look an order of magnitude smaller to me.

As for where the money comes from, doesn't that just fall out of supply and demand? As demand for electricity increases, prices will go up, funding the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate the increased demand.

The solution may not even lie in the grid. Batteries can solve the grid problem as well as the battery problem. Give every electric car customer enough solar to cover his charging needs and a fixed storage installation to keep the power for when the car comes home, and the grid won't even know the cars are there.

I'm sure this will all be wonderfully challenging for those involved, but it doesn't look like something to worry about from the outside.

> As for where the money comes from, doesn't that just fall out of supply and demand? As demand for electricity increases, prices will go up, funding the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate the increased demand.

Looking forward to oil-shareholders claiming how expensive electric cars for the elites are making electricity unaffordable for the poor.

As soon as we have good cheap batteries, you don't need the grid. You have batteries charging from solar during the day, your car is charging at night.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com