Of course in Michigan they get some particularly good pr from supporting anything that is part of Michigan trying to rebuild an industry for itself. Not just GM, but othersas well.
I don’t want to sound hardhearted, but 500 to 1000 deaths a year doesn’t sound that bad. Compared to the 34,000 people a year that get killed in automobile accidents and the 64,000 premature deaths from air pollution, it’s a rounding error.
There would also be a decrease in deaths from gasoline related fires and explosions and carbon monoxide poisoning. Nissan has plans for a charger that works by magnetic induction rather than a direct electrical connection, so they wouldn’t be any risk of electrocution. The induction charger would be sitting on the floor of the garage and you would just park your EV on top of it.
What the Westinghouse people are saying sounds about right, but hardly means we can’t solve it. We we building more than 4 reactors a year during the seventies and so were the French during the eighties. The Chinese are starting a new reactor every month and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get to a reactor a week by 2020.
We will have to build a lot of infrastructure and recover a lot of forgotten skills to do mass construction of nuclear power plants, but it isn’t like we don’t need the jobs.
I read some of the studies on EVs. The important thing to know is the difference between baseload and peaking power. Baseload power is generated using the most efficient plants that run 7/24. Peaking power is older and less efficient plants that sometimes lack modern pollution controls. These plants are only put on the grid during high demand periods. They may only be run a few hours a day or only the summer with peak AC demand.
You can charge up the EVs at night by using peaking plants that are usually offline, but that is the most expensive electricity. If you want to do it in massive quantities, then more baseload power plants is the cheaper solution.
Well if the vehicles are in Michigan, why would it be a bad idea to have charging stations built there? I suppose when they get them in Nebraska, they will be built in Nebraska .
If corporations get control, they will be built in Indonesia or China.
Of course not a bad idea. The point was merely that Meijer is not only doing this to get those two customers with EVs in those stores at a time, be they early adopters or not; they want the press of supporting local job growth in an emerging sector. It was merely a recognition that such may not apply as much to, say, Best Buys across the whole country.
I don’t know where you’re getting your information but peak use generators in my area are not old power plants, they are modern units (in groups) designed as advertised, for peak use.
looking ahead at the idea they would do well not to put these close to the store. If they create another buffer zone next to the handicapped spaces it will not be received well by the general public.
My understanding is that peakers are most often natural gas turbines. They are modern, compared to baseline coal, clean, but not designed for efficiency. They cost more to run per unit power produced and are not designed to run in a prolonged fashion. The utilities would love to see valley-filling. The more their baseline plants are fully utilized, the more profitable they are. The more they can avoid turning on the peakers the better for them as well.
Perhaps…I don’t say these things to poo-poo the electric car, but just to state that I think these folks made a case for making a broad-based analysis of the pluses and minuses, so we could try to mitigate some unintended consequences - such as making a better code for installation of and manufacture of EV charging outlets. And I would further editorialize by saying that it’s a good time to crack down on people who don’t follow the NEC…
I concur.
There’ll be a ramp-up period needed, which will require a firm commitment to build, and build lots of plants. And one thing which Westinghouse is afraid of is that Areva will come into the US market with an established cookie-cutter design and essentially take over the market.
It also means, in agreement with you, that we can do it, but we need to start today on getting ready for it. And I for one would really like to see if thorium designs can be made commercial on a large-scale to help with EV adoption.
I agree; peaking power plants are most often simple-cycle (SC) gas turbines which while cheap to install, have a very high generation cost due to the cost of fuel. They also are not really supposed to operate in a baseload fashion, although that is changing as the technology is evolving. My company has built some baseload SC gas turbine plants, as well as combined-cycle (CC) baseload plants. Now it is true that in some situations a utility will throw every plant which can generate into the pool when power prices are high enough. One example I know of is an old, inefficient oil plant I work with, which produces power at about $50 per MWh. That’s much, much more expensive than the more efficient coal plants in their system are - but when power’s selling for $1,000 per MWh in the summer, well, $950 per MWh of profit is impossible to ignore.
If they are new plants and used for peaking power, then they are probably Natural Gas turbines. The common pattern is to use simple turbines for peaking power and combined cycle plants for base load power. The thermal efficiency of the combined cycle plants is nearly 50% higher than a simple turbine, which means that a CC plant is much more expensive to build, but the electricity is much cheaper. You might be able to check that yourself if you know the name of the plant. Check on www.eia.doe.gov.
Natural Gas turbines are almost a perfect peaking power source, since they can be spun up quickly in response to changes in demand. If you run a utility company, then the problem with NG is pretty much explained by this price chart.
This study is for PHEVs with a range of 33 miles on a full charge, not for EVs and they are saying the same thing I did, they just call it intermediate generation instead of peaking power. Also check out the figures they gave for Sulfur Oxides and particulate emissions from running our older coal plants, without modern pollution controls full out.
I loved this statement:
Translation: We will make the city air cleaner by exporting the pollution to the countryside.
It totally ignores solar panels on garages and wind generating stations. Translation, it is an obsolete back thinking report. The future of electric cars also includes tomorrows electrical generation.
Intermediate generation plants are NOT the same thing as peakers. (pdf)
The calculations were for charging enough to cover an “estimated miles per year traveled in daily trips by personal vehicles to be approximately 12,000 miles per year per vehicle or about 33 miles per day per vehicle” That’s a pretty reasonable estimate of the charging needs whether the battery can travel much farther or not.
Given that no one expects 73% of the light duty fleet to become grid powered overnight, or by 2020, or maybe ever, I have a hard time reconciling the fact that the current grid could handle 73% of the fleet being EV now (at an average of 33 miles of charging per day) with a statement that “the only way to support a large EV fleet would be to bring online about 1.5 GW of nuclear power every 3 months, for about 50 years, starting now” - without some pretty damn big definition of “large”. Yes new (and cleaner) generating capacity should be added. And as there may be some EV enclaves, cul de sac concentrations of current happy consumers all plugging in at night, some local transformer upgrades may be needed too. But any reasonable definition of “large” requires smart charging more than more capacity.
And do keep the SOX finding in context. VOCs, CO, NOX, all down.
Translation: the majority of pollutants would dramatically decrease even if there was NO improvement to the current grid by the time 73% of the light duty fleet was EV charging 33 miles per day on average. Particulates and SOX are the exception if, and only if, we continue using the same dirty coal we currently use to the same amount and in the same exact way without any improvements - no retiring of older dirtier coal plants, no new nuclear or renewables, no retrofitted improvements to current coal plants or co-firing biomass with the coal.
To look at that claim of needing “1.5 GW of nuclear power every 3 months, for about 50 years” in even more detail -
In 2008 generating capacity over peak demand period (summer) was 15.3 GW. At that rate we’d double the current capacity in 2.5 yrs!
Meanwhile, per the report, “Providing 73% of the daily energy requirements of the U.S. LDV fleet with electricity would add approximately 910 billion kWh, an increase of about 24% of the total U.S. annual generation in 2002” (At 33 miles of driving per day on average.) In 2008 annual generation was 4,119 billion kWh. Which they conclude is what could be met by fully utilizing our extant base load and intermediate load capacity.
Even if there was no valley filling, and all charging occurred at peak demand times and the average driver drove significantly more than 33 miles a day on average, claiming that we’d need a total of 300GW (!) of additional capacity (1.5GW/quarter x 4quarters/yr x 50yrs) is absurd.
I think the number Una quoted included power plant replacement and not just the additional plants needed to increase the power needed for EV fueling. In my area this is a real concern. I can go down a list of power plants that have been shut down/torn down without replacement. We rely on peak use generators to bridge the gap.
So what they are saying is that we can supply enough power if we run all the old, dirty and inefficient coal plants full time, which is what I said in the first place. So the only part that you are disagreeing with is the word peaking instead of intermediate?