This would be a good time to look at an emergency backup generator. If transformers blow during a storm or other issue, power may not be coming back soon. Also, it’s going to be difficult to upgrade transformers to handle the load of electric cars.
If you live in California you might want to hurry, because in their wisdom they have addressed their grid instability problems by banning gas backup generators after 2024. Can’t have people looking after themselves, can we? Gas generators are a trivial source of GHG emissions because they rarely run. But when you need them, you REALLY need them.
I have been reading this, and will comment on it more when I’m done. But my first takeaways are:
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Their goals are far more modest than what Canada is trying to do. They are trying to get to 50% renewables by 2030, starting from a place where they are almost already there. And that goal is only for electricity production. They aren’t touching gas heating and other uses of fossils.
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New York has significant non-fossil energy sources. Lots of hydro, lots of nuclear, offshore wind, and at a more southern latitude solar works better, although NY isn’t great for solar power.
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They are ALREADY at 50%, if they would just count nuclear power. But it seems like their main goal is to get rid of nuclear and replace it with wind and solar. That’s a really bad idea, but if they do it they will still have significant baseload power.
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What New York has really been doing is replacing coal and oil power with natural gas. Wind and solar are a trivial amount of their power generation. and will remain so. But the shift to natural gas is what’s giving them their big GHG reductions.
I highly recommend this video, which does a good job of describing where we are at with Lithium:
This from someone who owns an EV and is a big proponent of the energy transition. But he’s a scientist and a realist.
The short version: We’re going to run out of lithium for electric cars until we open more mines beyond those that already are on the books, and even then we can’t meet the mandates that the EU and US have created. Unless we can ramp up battery recycling and figure out how to do it economically, EVs are going to get increasingly expensive over the next decade and we will be lucky to get sales up to even 50% of ICE cars by 2040.
There is no space in the lithium supply for any significant amount of grid storage. And as we hit capacity for the cheap deposits of lithium, we’ll have to turn to more expensive extraction, driving prices up further.
This is a very hard problem, and hardly anyone is addressing it or the ramifications of it. Instead of subsidizing EVs in a resource-constrained market, that money should be going into battery recycling research. Streamlining permitting and regulation of domestic lithium mines should be a primary focus. Subsidizing cars will just drive prices up and hasten the point at which price increases of lithium outstrip any subsidies.
And without grid storage, we will need nuclear power and more natural gas. The only substitute for natural gas is grid battery storage. Pumped hydro and other storage methods are too slow to respond to instantaneous power fluctuations.
You only need a tiny amount of battery storage for grid smoothing. Various grid battery systems around the world have proven not just to be useful, but highly profitable; able to respond more quickly than natural gas and undercut the price. Battery storage will probably not be cheap enough for a while to handle the long term, but using batteries to smooth short-term demand and pumped hydro, etc. for the long term is a great combination.
I’d say we’re reaching the point where gas-fired peaker plants have an uncertain future. Batteries may well eat most of their potential profits, making them even less economical and inviting other technologies to pick up the slack.
Actually, scientists and researchers are.
What we have now is that lithium is better for small electronics, but for cars and other big items they are expensive, still the economics are on their side, but what I have seen is that as soon as industry does get into those issues described, change will follow to use less troublesome materials than lithium.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01084-9
In the intensive search for novel battery architectures, the spotlight is firmly on solid-state lithium batteries. Now, a strategy based on solid-state sodium–sulfur batteries emerges, making it potentially possible to eliminate scarce materials such as lithium and transition metals.
