I guess…from 0% EV adoption to 100% EV adoption should result in 20% more electricity demand globally…it may be wrong…I had done a back-of-the-envolope calculation
Not really. You just have to remember to plug it in when you park when you come home. Is that really that much harder of a habit to get into than, say, locking the car, or shutting the garage door?
And even assuming you forget, chances are it won’t be an issue; it would take several nights of forgetting before you’re so low that you’re going to run out during your commute. Long before that happens you’re going to notice you’re low on juice on the dashboard display.
I have a pretty common commute; about 30 minutes, 11 miles one way. Call it 25 miles/day to and from work including small side-trips before and after work. Heck, throw in another 25 to account for moderate solo trips to other places.
That’s still only 50 miles a day, if I’m extremely active and not just driving to and from work. On a modest EV with a 200 mile range, I’d have to forget to charge my car for 4 days before there was any issue. My workplace has EV chargers on some spaces as well, so I’d have to forget to do any charging when I park at work as well. And also forget when I see EV chargers at businesses like Walgreens that have them now as well.
I don’t have an electric vehicle; but frankly, I think the odds of running out of charge would actually be smaller than they currently are that I’ll put off filling my tank too long, and run out of gas before I make it to a station.
Magiver indeed comes up with a reason why fast charge batteries with consumers treating EVs in the same inconvenient manner of stopping somewhere to “fill up” while they wait would be an asinine prime model. Adding huge amounts of quick charging spikes at peak demand hours would be a major stress.
Fast charge will an infrequently used option, needed mainly on interstates. It will be avoided in any case because of the inconvenience compared to just plugging in when you get home but it also should be charged at a discouragingly high premium.
The model that makes the most sense and that protects the grid is one already available in California under the name “Juicenet” in which the charger communicates and co-ordinates with regional power companies’ grid management systems dynamically modulating the overnight top off, sharing the consequent savings with the consumer.
Of course it will be quite a few years until the vast majority of new cars sold are EV land many decades until a majority of cars on the road are. The ICE vehicles being sold today will last likely two decades before they get replaced out of the total driving pool (even if their original owners have moved on to a newer vehicle).
SamuelA is correct and I will expand.
In this era of cheaper gasoline, the bulk of EV market expansion will occur when batteries get cheap enough that EVs with 200 plus range are no more expensive or cheaper to purchase than comparably sized and equipped ICE vehicles to those who can fairly easily have overnight access to an L2 EVSE at their homes. We are not there yet but are getting closer. The grid has plenty of capacity overnight.
Expanding the market to those who do not have easy access to overnight charging will require not fast charging but wide access to L2 EVSEs where they park their cars during the day. That will increase daytime grid demands and it will need to cost something more than overnight charging to discourage those who do have overnight access from using it. That something can be a charge but also can be the electricity flow being bidirectional with banks of smart charging vehicles not only stopping their charge demand during spikes in grid demand but able to serve as a source stored power for transient demand spikes. The price premium for the electricity to the vehicles plugged in daytime can be offset to the degree that the vehicles are open to being used to buffer those hardest to handle peak demand spikes with consumers setting how much they are willing to do so and what charge they want as a minimum at what time. One can imagine a price structure and vehicle range/needs such that some owners with overnight EVSE access will leave their home fully charged and be willing to essentially rent daytime access to their batteries and sell some of its electricity to the utility to serve in that grid stabilization capacity so long as they leave at the end of the day with ample to get back home with no range anxiety. Banks of these vehicles plugged in widely could in fact work together with some degree of renewable energy production helping buffer some of its intermittency.
But again decades to get there.
All of this presumes people have garages and spend the money on decent chargers and we have the grid capacity to run it all. Fast charge batteries WILL come on-line and the desire to own an EV is going to hit a brick road of reality. In the mean time, those buying EV’s will have to monitor their charge state on a daily basis unlike their previous ICE car which required no consideration for level of fuel. And to round things out we will have to raise the price of electricity to cover fuel taxes used for road repair/construction. Hopefully they will link that to miles driven and not all electrical consumption.
I predicted the slow sales of the Volt which was followed a year later by a bunch of post-sales excuses as to why it didn’t catch on. It’s the [del]economy[/del] battery stupid. People don’t want to babysit their car. Those who purchase EV’s now have garages, the space available IN the garage for a car, and the money for a charging station.
Paying for a trillion dollar cake is not having it. I gave general estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars possibly trillions for the infrastructure of such a system.
Who predicts that and for what year? Is that manufacturers cost, or after the middle man and retail outlets? Incidentally, the $12,000 figure I gave earlier for the Tesla S replacement batteries I learned was projected of what they hope it will cost in the future. In 2014, the price was still $45,000 for their battery pack. Volt’s batteries are cheaper, but are a bit different system.
Initially these type of battery systems were more labor intenstive, not so much now. But there is still not much wiggle room with labor only involved with 33% of the costs to make these batteries. 66% of costs are materials, and some of that material mined is in nationalistic countries, some not friendly to the West. With some also predicting the materials are going to go up.
Any very long-term forecasts for battery cost should be taken with a grain of salt, there are too many variables, and most don’t really know what kind of impact the law of supply and demand is going to have, assuming any particularly battery even wins out for EV’s for long-term.
We have gotten a bit further away from just removing the battery packs on this thread, so won’t spend much time on other alternatives, but it’s been an interesting thread. I will say one company did try the battery pack replacement system some years back, but went bankrupt.
Electrifying the entire highway hasn’t gained much traction to date, but for the designing such a system and a a car with a much smaller scale battery for hybrid use shouldn’t be ruled out.
Flywheel technology for a storage system still hasn’t gotten very far, although it has some supporters, nothing really viable yet.
Supercapacitors may be coming on soon, and would certainly be a viable contender to the batteries if the data is correct. Mazda is adopting such tech to their braking systems with a supercapactor from Japan, I believe. A South Korean firm has invested heavily with this supercapacitor techonology, wanting to take it much further than that, and seems to think they are ready to compete with the batteries. The supercapacitors offer much lighter weight, tens of thousands of cycles, faster recharge time in the seconds or couple of minutes, and over 300 mile range if what is coming out is to be believed.
Regardless, of which technology wins out, there are going to be some winners and lots of losers before the dust settles. America had one giant tech boom back during the nineities which got us out of red ink for a few years. Europe benefited too with their economies around this time. This technology should create another tech-boom world-wide. It’s good that the technology is slowly being phased in too, and we still have enough petrol to slowly ease into it before mostly phasing it out altogether which will give us a much cleaner planet.
Could someone tell me, as these newer type batteries get older, will it start losing their range over a period of time, or will it occur rapidly? Also, if they do in fact start losing their range, will it still take the same amount of electricity to charge them, even though the range has been shortened? I’m getting sketchy reports in on this.
Others commenting on the Chevy Volt’s system say in the warranty section, there is some print that while claiming 8 year warranty, mention while they don’t expect any battery degradation, they still say it’s possible to lose 10-40%, which if the latter figure is correct would drastically reduce its range.
Reason I ask, is because I had once an electric bike that was the latest new and improved battery ($550), that I only got about a year out of it and roughly 1,100 miles before it completely bit the dust. Degradation went rapidly, within a few weeks, it went from about a 25 mile range, to 15 miles a few days later, to 8 miles, then to about a mile all within about two weeks. So even with the reduced range, it still took the same amount of electricity to charge it. I had red led’s that used to all light up, that didn’t happen toward the end of its life.
Just curious as to what hybrid and EV’s can expect as their batteries age.
Degradation happens gradually. I think what you experienced is a battery failure, possibly a failed cell in the battery. If that happened in a car, the battery management system would detect the failed cell and tell you to take the car for service.
Electric car batteries have much longer lifetime than other batteries (phones, laptops, electric bikes, flashlights) for several reasons:
[ul]
[li]Car batteries have thermal management. They all have cooling fans on the batteries, and also stop charging when the battery is too warm. Many electric cars (Tesla, Volt/Bolt, etc) have liquid-cooled batteries. [/li][li]Cars don’t let you use the full capacity of the batteries. They stop charging before the cells are completely full, and stop running before they are completely run down. (Though they usually have a limp-home mode to access the last bit of energy in an emergency.) The Chevy Volt is an extreme example - it has a 16 kWh battery but only uses the middle 10 kWh. [/li][li]Similar but related - the typical discharge/charge cycle is even shallower than the already conservative limit set by design. Because the battery capacity is much larger than is used on a typical day.[/li][li]Slower charging. Car batteries are charged over several hours. Except Tesla Superchargers and some DC Fast Charge systems, but those are only intended for occasional use. If you use a Supercharger every day, your battery will degrade faster.[/li][/ul]
And by the way, the Chevy Volt warranty allows for up to 30% degradation, not 40%. But since the battery is 50% oversized to begin with, I think the user won’t see any reduction in range.
Perhaps my case was total battery failure. Was just curious as these batteries age, whether or not it is going to take the same amount of electricity, but with less range, which would motivate more to go ahead and get their batteries earlier instead of later.
If I read it right, I got that figure from their owners manual with this cite stating:
It is not really that huge a deal, though. One advantage to electric cars is that they use significantly less energy per mile than ICEs. Adding generating capacity, even in the form of hydrocarbon generators (preferably high-efficiency ECE-type systems) should not be a struggle, if we can muster the foresight to do it sooner, rather than when it becomes a problem.
Generators will use less energy because they run more smoothly than vehicle engines. So the net gain will be somewhere between pretty good and tremendous. Fuel used to pump out EV juice will be much better spent than fuel used to push vehicles back and forth directly. But we really should be ramping up yesterday.
And the offset will be partially drawn from the decline of the various businesses that fuel and service cars. From what I can see, fuel looks like about a quarter of the TCO of a conventional vehicle, plus maintenance at around five percent. The cost of the battery pack is a large initial outlay, but charging is comparatively negligible to the price of HC fuel, and maintenance is a vanishing fraction of a percent. From this angle, BEVs look like a great deal, except for the holes they might punch in economic opportunity (mechanics out of work).
Usage taxation might prove challenging. Yet, fuel tax only goes toward highways. EVs will see a large fraction of their use on streets, which are paid for through regular property tax. Expanding a broader tax model of that type should not be all that hard. Or the state could just require metering of the charger, adding road tax to the electric bill based on that.
The arguments I see against EVs sound like big-oil shill-yap. This is closer than the horizon, now. We should have been working on adjusting to it decades ago.
To eschereal’s point, even though the Tesla Model S’s larger battery can only store about as much energy as three gallons of gas, it can travel as car on one “fill” as a roughly equivalent gas car can on 15-18 gallons of gas.
I just went and looked at my warranty booklet in my own 2013 Volt, and it says 10-30%. But it appears they may have changed that for the 2017 model year. Thanks for the correction.
the problem with flywheel technology is that is causes an unstable condition with that much rotating mass. I saw it demo’d years ago. Neat idea if the wheel is mounted parallel to the vehicle’s wheels. That would take up a lot of real estate.
I saw capacitor batteries in a NASA demonstration using cordless drills. It would recharge a battery pack in seconds. The drawback was a larger displacement with less power capacity but much lighter. You could sacrifice space in a van for these things without a weight penalty. It’s a complete wag on my part but it would take more than twice the space of current lithium batteries based on what I saw. But that was over 5 years ago.
If lithium batteries are any indication there won’t be a single battery winner. Different lithium batteries have different qualities that serve different needs.
The problem with EV discussions revolve around predicting future technology. I see the invention of the quick charge battery as the single most influential part of of this but there is going to be transitional technology. One idea for a pure EV vehicle is a trailer hitch generator. Pop it in when you need it.
agree
Considering it’s probably underfunded currently due to higher mileage vehicles it will interesting to see how that plays out. If it’s done as a straight tax then those who don’t own cars will still pay for road use whether it’s for a bus or bicycle. and that eliminates the cost of monitoring and collecting the tax.
Would counter-rotating flywheels avoid this problem?
Not really. Balance is one concern, which counter-rotating flywheels does not address. But the biggest problem is material stability. You have to have a flywheel constructed to store energy in its spinning mass, but, as a circular spinning mass, it has to deal with the imbalance of speed/inertia across its breadth. Faster is better, but faster tends to want to rip the flywheel apart.
while this is probably true, counter rotating wheels would cancel each other out. I saw a working model of this many years ago but it was used mainly to even out the energy lost in stop and go traffic. it makes more sense with an ICE powered car because of the inefficiencies of the engine. It might be more efficient way of storing energy vs recharging batteries but it comes with a weight penalty for all other driving conditions.
Here is a chart of the Model S/X with lots of data points.
The trendline shows that even at 250,000 km (156k miles), the battery is typically still above 90%. There are some early outliers in the 85-90% range. Tesla has a pretty decent battery warranty; if the degradation got much worse than that it would be replaced.
I would think those are good numbers. The first Teslas would have used outsourced batteries. The newer ones would be from Tesla’s factory.
That’s not enough. I really liked my Energi, but I took a pony car last time around partially because getting access to a charger was becoming impossible (and, also, convertible!). Tripling them still won’t be enough to meet demand, although admittedly, we probably don’t represent the general population. Tripling and a logical layout, would give a six-fold increase. Maybe that would work. (Right now, when a car is done charging and sitting there, there’s no way to charge another car, because they chargers are a long a sidewalk. How about head-to-head parking, so we can unplug other cars when they’re done?)
eh, they’re just all hogged by management lease vehicles (yes, we can tell by the license plate #) who never go out and move them when they’re finished charging.
soon as those things were put in, a bunch of PHEV lease cars showed up.