You might have room to store both an F150 and a city car. But most of us can’t fit both an F150 and a city car in our garage no matter how small the city car is. So we drive the F150 empty to work every day since we can’t tow a boat with the city car on the weekend so our “only” car has to be the one that meets all our needs even if it’s wildly overkill for most of them.
Yes, there’s a lot of two car families so maybe the second car could be a small electric car, but small, cute cars like the Smart4Two weren’t that much more economical than your basic compact sedan while being a lot less versatile.
It’s also worth observing that the shift to EVs is going to be taking place at the same time as other electrification efforts, particularly around water and space heating - as well as simultaneous with a shift towards more intermittent electricity sources such as wind and solar. The overall grid is going to need significant upgrades in the next few decades - everything from more long-distance HVDC lines to better distribution out through neighborhoods. If it were just EVs, we could probably squeak by with close to what we have now. But it’s going to be everything, and it’s going to take a big effort.
I guess being able to use cheap and plentiful natural gas to heat our homes nice and toasty warm on cold winter nights in the Midwest is naughty or something, so we’ll have to use hyper-expensive electricity to do it instead. The coldest part being in the middle of the night, when the sun isn’t shining on solar panels and everyone is charging their electric car for work tomorrow.
I wouldn’t say that using that ‘cheap and plentiful’ natural gas to keep your home nice and toasty is ‘naughty’ per se, but it’s definitely not sustainable. That cheapness is misleading: it appears cheap, because you don’t directly pay for disposal of the exhaust gases. So making that cost visible is one solution. Replacing the natural gas stream with biogas would be another. But where the country seems to be trending is wide-scale electrification.
I also heat my home with natural gas today. I pay about 90c a therm vs about 10c per kwh. But a therm is a lot more energy than a kwh - about 29.3x more. So electricity is about 3.3x more expensive for me here on a unit-of-energy basis - feel free to plug in your own numbers for your own region.
However, my gas furnace is about 95% efficient, which is about the upper end of efficiency for gas furnaces. So I’m really paying about 94.7c for that therm’s worth of heat. But a modern heat pump can be around 300% efficient: because it’s using electricity to move heat from one place (outside) to another (inside), it can - and does - exceed 100%. At that rate, it comes pretty close to breaking even - that same therm of heat would cost me about 98c.
Now the numbers may be worse for you. Maybe your electricity-to-gas cost ratio is higher. It almost certainly gets colder where you are than here, which hurts the heat pump’s efficiency (though if it’s really cold, an investment in a geothermal heat pump may start to be worthwhile.) But probably not so much worse that it’d be worth paying an extra buck or two per therm, which is what it’ll take to pull that CO2 back out of the atmosphere in the future.
That’s not how it works. If you had solar, sometimes you’d generate more than you use, so the power company uses your power on the grid. Sometimes you use more than you generate, so you use power from the grid.
I think his point is that, in the aggregate, for his region, the presumed period of maximum demand in a fully-electrified future would correspond with the period of minimum supply. That means that his region will need significant storage capacity, which will increase costs. There are some assumptions in there - in particular that solar will be a significant part of his region’s mix and that peak demand really will be at night and can’t be managed to more optimal times of day - that I don’t have enough data to evaluate.
ETA - you could solve the problem with overbuild of non-solar sources instead of storage, too. Though that also increases costs.
The problem is that once you get to a certain level of grid solar, when yoyr own solar is making excess power so is the grid, and the price of energy can drop to zero, or even go negative. So yoyr excess power is worthless. Then when it’s dark and you need power, so does everyone else and so does the grid - so power has to be imported at peak prices.
Right now some providers are offering fixed buyback prices. But they can only do that when their own power sources are decoupled from the citizen solar time of day cycles, and while citizen solar is a tiny fraction of generated power. Once we get significant amounts of solar on both sides, the subsidies required to pay for fixed rate buyback would become enormous.
Ontario is a good example. On sunny days Ontario sometimes has to pay other grid partners to take their excess power. Then on cloudy days or at night, they don’t make enough and have to buy power from the grid at premium prices. They pay for this by tariffs on everyone’s power bill, making Ontario’s electricity the most expensive in Canada…
Now imagine what will happen if everyone does what Ontario does - if everyone’s power is coupled to the same constraints, there won’t be excess power to buy when it’s calm and dark or cloudy or storming, and there will be no one to buy the excess power when it’s sunny.
This is one more reason why many experts say the limit for grid level wind and solar is around 20-25% of total capacity, unless long-term storage at reasonable cost can be developed. And right now, no one has a solution for that.
Cite? I think you can get substantially higher than that. However you need both substantial overcapacity [you need the ability to generate 3 times or so as much renewable energy than you need at maximum] and substantial amounts of HVDC (high voltage, direct current) power lines to move electricity from areas of surplus to areas of deficit.
In terms of long term storage, something which may solve that may also solve other problems: hydrogen. This other problems include long distance transport (ships, airplanes, long distance big trucks) and high temperature heat in areas like steel, cement, chemicals.
(This is true for renewables in general, not just home generated solar.)
Boy if only there were some batteries around to fill up when electricity is cheap, free, or even paid to take?
Cars are NOT driven roughly what, 90 to 95% of the day? Again, it is not so hard to imagine public chargers, widely distributed where people are parking during the day as well as at their homes, with even the simplest technologic application, only G2V, charging only when prices drop below a certain threshold, buffering times of excess production. Right now those best buy troughs are in the very wee hours when we are asleep. If a power generation mix though makes that best buy period from 10am to 3pm, well fill up then. (Please note a level 2 charger will replace the average driver’s daily need in less than 2 hours of charging.) And the potential advantage of adding V2G for micro-buffering has been previously brought up.
In order to charge cars when the sun is shining and the weather is not so cold as opposed to the coldest part of the night, we’d chargers in every office parking space, maybe at shops too.
People are not going to like to have to micromanage their car battery to tell your computer that you need 25.3 miles of range tomorrow so the grid can draw 136.4 miles of range for electrical resistance heat for buildings overnight. When I put gas in my car I don’t have to think about it disappearing until I drive using it.
I’m just wondering why a discussion about the mix of energy sources has anything whatsoever to do with the viability of electric cars?
So Sam has explained why we can’t rely on 100% solar for our electrical power grid.
OK, that’s fine.
Does this mean that EV’s are not viable as personal automobiles? No. Not it does not. It’s a red herring, and one that I’ve seen used in other discussion groups.
Well, that would be ridiculous, you’re right. But you wouldn’t micromanage to anywhere near that degree. I mean, we’re projecting a fair way out here, a decade or two at the very least. 20 years from now, it is not unreasonable to expect most detached homes will have a level 2 charger, and that a great many parking lots at places like apartments/condos/hotels/workplaces will have spaces with at least level 1 charging. I mean, the latter is already true where I live (Saskatchewan) because people want to plug in block heaters.
If charging opportunities are abundant, then whenever you’re only using your car for a shortish commute and some running about town, which is the use case for most people most of the time (and when we’re talking about integrating cars as grid energy storage, we don’t care about the less common people who use a full charge every day, we care about averages), then you’re actually going to prefer if your car is floating between, say, 50-85% charge. This will get you the greatest battery longevity, and in our 10-20 years from now hypothetical where the EVs have better range than they do now still give you plenty of excess range for daily use. So you’d set your car to charge up to 85% below a certain price threshold, and discharge down to 50% above a certain price threshold, and then never think about it again except when you’re going to visit your parents on the weekend when you’ll schedule a full charge and disallow discharging. Maybe you’d have multiple thresholds in each direction at various price points. “I like to keep it above 60% charge, but if they’re going to pay me $0.30kW/h for energy I stored at $0.12kW/h, then I’ll let them pull it down to 45%” or “I depend on my car having at least 40% range, so it will charge to that overnight no matter the price, but after that I don’t care about range, so I use this app that predicts price variations and charges and discharges based on when it thinks it can turn a profit. So far I’ve been saving $10/week with the app compared to when I just set a basic threshold charge.”
My image of that app is an interface with just a few sliders to set a couple of charging profiles: one my daily commute profile; and another need fully charged by X time profile for a next day with more than usual travel expected.
@LivingGhost371 it sort of like setting that you want your gas tank always at 1/3 to 3/4s full, gas put in automatically at the lowest price pumps around, and it is. Never stopping off at a gas station, just habitually conveniently plugging in wherever there is a charger, home or otherwise.
That was my wedding party with my Scotch thanks to my, may he rest in peace, father-in-law, who told me after the fact that he put one server on the task of keeping my drink between those levels with me never to see him do it … I had quite a fun wedding party!
My car now can read my calendar to automatically set my destination when I have an upcoming appointment. I imagine the same thing could be done to manage charging. Perhaps no need to tell the car to make sure it is fully charged in the morning of a trip; it will already know.
Keep in mind, this thread was spun off the What Are Your Electric Vehicle Plans? one, where almost every time someone explained what they hoped to do with their EV, someone (okay, Sam) would pounce on them to throw cold water on their hopes.
With that kind of purpose for this thread, I just want to tell people not to get discouraged by the cynicism here about the future of EVs.
Heck, I have no budget, long trips, and only have on-street parking at home, so if I can keep hope alive (and who knows, string extension cords from tree to tree?), we all can.
Getting back to the viability of electric cars in general… The International Energy Agency has just released a comprehensive report on the materials and infrastructure needed to get to a renewable transition, including electric cars, and it’s not pretty.
From the executive summary:
Bolding mine. With respect to electric cars:
The report goes on with many more scary facts. For example, the current mines and mine projects in development are projected to only account for half of the cobalt, lithium, and other raw materials needed for the ‘green’ initiatives already planned. Furthermore, on average it takes 16.5 years to go from planning a mine to the first delivery of material, so we can’t ramp up mining fast enough to cover all this.
Also, current production of cobalt and rare earth minerals are mostly in China and the Congo, with horrible human and environmental records,
There is a lot more bad news in that report. In short, if we keep going the way we are going, the prices of all the raw materials that go into solar, wind, and electric cars will rise dramatically in the later part of this decade and shortages will prevent or seriously delay the construction of infrastructure. And because the needs of power generation overlap with electric cars (batteries, copper, rare earths), trying to build out a renewable power infrastructure will drive up the price of EV’s and vice versa.
There is one bright spot: Nuclear power uses a fraction of raw materials per MWh as does wind and solar, so if we’d just get off our asses and transition to nuclear instead of low density, intermittant power we would need fewer resources to build them, the grid wouldn’t need as many batteries, and this would all get much more manageable.
Otherwise, are you all on board with a massive expansion of mining in countries that exploit children and slave labor, and the environmental damage that will go along with it?
Some of us have been pointing out for years that solar and wind require huge amounts of resources that are quite damaging to mine, and which will begin to drive the cost of energy back up. This report basically says the same thing. Just a few weeks ago I posted about the battery requirements to provide even one day’s backup power for the Diablo Canyon station, and it was more than all the EV batteries made to date.
We can’t keep going down this path. We need a better strategy than just hoping we’ll ‘figure out a way’. If we want to transition to electric cars by 2035, those extra mines should be in development NOW, Yet, I see no action on that front at all. Biden’s ‘green’ infrastructure bill has no plans for supporting or funding more mining of the needed materials. But it does have lots and lots of unnecessary projects that will compete for the same resources, making the problem worse.
