Merci beaucoup!
Sorry about that. I figured most people were familiar with it. And thanks to @running_coach for defining it.
TL;DR: Utilities are thinking about this, and already have programs in place to deal with it at the level of individual EVs.
Right now, so this is technology that is here today, my utility can schedule when my EV charges in order to even out demand. This is a similar concept (though different technology) to how utilities put a device on air conditioners to turn them off during times of excessive demand.
If I get home at 5:30pm and plugin the car, then nothing happens. If left on its own, the car will start charging at 7pm, which is the time I’ve told it to start, because that’s when my cheap electricity starts.
In the program run by evPulse and Xcel, when I plugin my car, evPulse knows. They then get the state of charge of the battery (45%, for example), my desired final state of charge (90%), and when I’ve told them I want it to be done charging (7am, for example). Because evPulse doesn’t remember from session to session, they start my car charging for 10 minutes, to get the charging speed (about 6kWh).
So in the example above, my car is going to need about 6 hours to charge. evPulse knows this now, so it knows that it can start my car charging anytime between 7pm and 1am in order for it to be finished by 7am. Then evPulse and Xcel can decide when my car starts charging in order to optimally distribute the load.
There are other similar programs offered by Xcel, that instead of using evPulse to talk to the car, use a different service to talk to a network connected charging adapter.
With that in place, Xcel can start charging some cars earlier, and delay some until later, to temporally distribute load, and to predict load.
It’s an issue the engineers, at least, are aware of.
Kind of need policymakers to get involved though and not think the magic of the market will solve all problems. While that may work in the long-term, there’s a lot of short-term pain that can be avoided if there were more clarity and planning from the top.
Ok so it seems to me that there are lots of problems that need to be worked out before EV’s become mainstream, and I admit that the timeline I’ve been hearing is off by quite a few years. I also can’t help but notice they keep pushing further into the future with the timelines. I remember hearing lots of talk about how, in 2025 or 2030, it’ll be EV’s! 15 years ago. It’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen. I won’t even bring up long haul over the road trucking here.
I personally still think that the EV proponents are living in a dream world, thinking EV’s will save them from making hard decisions on the future of transportation.
Bringing it back to the OP, I think I’ve given good reason why people hate EV’s at this point in time. No belief in an apocalyptic future required.
Based on everything happening in the EV world, I’d say the majority of new vehicle sales will be EVs sometime between 2025 and 2030. The supply of lithium may be the biggest stumbling block that prevents this, or rather puts it off a few years.
I’m not sure what decisions those are. What other options do you see?
From what I have heard, long haul over the road trucking is a dying industry anyway. Most goods only travel at most a few hundred miles on a truck. For longer distances, they go by train nowadays.
I do think EV’s for personal use have a role to play, but not at the expense of other more efficient forms of transportation.
For example, I don’t think that battery EV buses or trains are a good idea. They could be run directly electric but stringing wire costs money. In that case a decision must be made to spend the money to build that. It would also take a societal change to centralize population centers.
I think the whole EV thing is a cop-out. The EV boosters are trying to say that things will be the same, you’ll just swap your ICE for an EV. They are basically saying that we as a society don’t have to change anything.
If the climate crisis is as bad as its being portrayed, and I’m willing to admit it may be, then why are the EV’ proponents saying that we can live the same lifestyle by substituting EV’s for ICE’s?
Several pro EV posts here kind of make it clear the technology is not ready. It’s unclear if it ever will be, but in the meantime, we waste all this money on trying to preserve an old reality, an old way of life.
I’m a locomotive engineer for a major, called Class 1, railroad in the US. I’m not going to get into responding to your post on this thread, but I will say all the major US mainlines should be electrified.
Really should have been years ago.
There’s actually quite a few e-buses being sold right now. Most, if not all, are made by Chinese companies, but they’re selling them all over the world. Both city and school buses. I haven’t heard of any EV intercity buses, but that has the same issue long-haul trucking does: lack of charging infrastructure.
I haven’t heard of much in the way of battery-powered trains, except maybe for a shuttle locomotive (or whatever they call locomotives that just move cars around a switching yard).
I don’t think anyone’s said it’s going to be a perfect replacement. There’s already been a billion or two words written about the differences, especially the charging/refueling difference, so I won’t add to those. So I think you’re arguing against a strawman here.
Yeah, seems to be a strawman.
I don’t recall a lot of talk back in 2010 about widespread EV adoption. I do recall a lot of talk about how the future was hybrids, which is what Toyota bet on (or some hubbub about hydrogen, which has now largely petered out).
That’s an ideal application for a battery loco. Like a garbage truck or mail truck, there’s tons of starting and stopping, and not a lot of high-speed cruising.
That said, there is work being done on EV tech for line haul and passenger trains. Electrification of rail (e.g. by adding overhead wires) is expensive, between $1M and $4M per mile, and it’s unsightly, so battery rail has some appeal here. This is especially the case for rail lines with light traffic, where there aren’t many train trips across which to amortize the construction cost. If you’ve already got a mostly electric rail system (e.g. Japan), battery-powered trains are a way to eliminate diesels on short, low-traffic segments without having to electrify the rail itself. The batteries can be charged when the train returns to the electrified segments of the track, or when it’s sitting at a station.
Here’s a battery line haul locomotive that’s currently undergoing testing:
So, I get that demand for charging electric vehicles overnight is different than the demand for air conditioning during the day.
But supposedly, since natural gas is apparently so evil, we’re suppose to be switching to electric heat pumps to heat our houses at night. Does our grid have capacity to both charge our cars and keep our houses nice and toasty warm on a -20 degree Midwestern night?
Given the relatively tiny amount of power a heat pump consumes versus the amount of warmth it produces, that’s not a realistic concern either.
Will more infrastructure be needed? Heck yeah. But more infrastructure is needed all over this country every day as new houses, shopping centers, and industrial facilities are built on what had been farmland or forest.
It sounds like you’re parroting the what-about-ism that the forces of stagnation are so fond of. You (any you) can name a thousand possible potential reasons why any technological change includes challenges. But assuming they’re ALL show-stoppers until each has been conclusively rejected is silly. As is rejecting the evidence of that rejection in a flurry of meta-what-about-ism.
The more education you get on this stuff, the fewer show-stoppers there are. Like zero. Except the embedded intransigence of the fossil fuel industry and their 150 million propaganda-besotted shills. Those deliberately misled and confused individuals may well stop technological progress using politics.
It’s not so much that natural gas is evil, but that it is more efficient to burn the natural gas at a power plant, and then use that electricity in a heat pump than it is to directly burn the natural gas for heat. The heat pump also means that renewable sources of electricity can be used when available. Can’t use wind power to heat a gas furnace.
-20 is just hyperbole. The coldest average nighttime temperature in Illinois is about 15. Colder in Minnesota at around -4. Both of those are manageable by modern heat pumps. Even if some times the auxiliary heater has to come on, the overall efficiency is still higher than a combustion furnace. If heat pumps only made sense in climates where the auxiliary heater was never needed, then why bother to include the auxiliary heater at all?
-20 is a real temperature here in Minneapolis, not hyperbole.
I’m aware that modern heat pumps, perhaps with electrical resistance supplemental heat, can get out houses nice and toasty warm on cold nights. The question is what happens to the electric grid when everyone is doing it at the same time everyone is charging their electric cars for the trip to work the next morning.
I think this question could have been asked with toasters & CRT TV’s, later with McMansion’s and plasma TV’s when they became popular. The grid does grow with demand.
But I’m not all in on heat pumps to the extent of abandoning all others and do like to see a combustion backup of some sort. Back up power/heat and lubrication seems like a good place for fossil fuels to be right now. And I do agree with -20F temps one is most likely better burning something, and I personally don’t really like the concept of heat pump only unless heating needs are minor. But that seems something to work out regionally.
In Rewiring America, Saul Griffith would give people incentives to plug in their EVs during the day (in the winter, when power is relatively plentiful) and then sell some of that power back to the grid at night, when heat pumps have a larger draw.
If you have a 300-mile range EV, and you know you’re not going to be driving more than 50 miles the next day, selling 200 miles worth of electrons at high-demand prices night after night could be a handsome secondary income, as long as you charge it back at work every day, when prices are cheaper.
He talks about other ways of doing “batteries”, many of which involve moving demand to times when supply is higher, and others where storage of energy is required. Many of these rely on the complementary nature of renewables; others require overprovisioning generation and then moving the power to where it’s needed (energy generated by Mexican wind turbines might end up in Minneapolis in the winter).
The battery powered switchers failed and have been purged from almost all Class 1 railroads. I know my railroad got rid of them years ago.
As I’ve said, railroads are the perfect case for using electric, and you don’t need the batteries at all. They already are electric and have been since the diesel locomotives were first introduced 100 years ago. It’s just that each locomotive is using an ICE to power a generator that powers an electric motor that is geared to the wheels.
Railroads are the prime example of how you could use EV’s efficiently, but no one wants to pay to string the wires.
I kind of amused by the thought that we will just upgrade the grid so everyone can have a personal EV, and at the same time think that the cost of electricity won’t skyrocket.
Hydrogen has petered out in the media attention, for now. BEV’s may be the new media star right now because it seems easy.
When all the true costs of BEV’s are finally broken down, I think that hydrogen will come out on top.
BEV’s will be forgotten like Betamax. Or CFL’s.