What are your electric vehicle plans?

[Sam_Stone]

@Euphonious_Polemic

I’ve heard this one repeated for the past 5 years, and it just does not hold up to scrutiny. For a start, it’s going to be a relatively slow transition; Every house on the block is not going to have an EV in the next 5 years.

See the link I just posted, in some areas, a single level-2 charger can push a distribution transformer above its rated capacity.

And I never said every house would have an electric car in five years. Don’t change the argument or move the goalposts.

@Euphonious_Polemic

Also, much home charging can be done on a 15 amp circuit. My LEAF charges overnight on a regular outdoor GFI plug. Draws as much as a toaster.

The new Nissan leaf takes 28.5 hours to fully charge on a level 1 charger. A Tesla Model 3 long range takes FIFTY hours to charge on a level 1 charger. Your toaster runs for a couple of minutes.

EV’s are becoming more desirable mainly because charge times are coming down with level 2 and 3 chargers, and because range is going up with larger batteries. Telling people they’ll have to use level 1 charging negates both of those. A Tesla 3 would be lucky to get a 20% charge overnight.

Some people might be able to live with that, stopping maybe at a supercharger once a week and then using level 1 charging to reduce the decline in battery level per day so they can maximize time between superchargers, but there will be lots of people for which that doesn’t work or is enough of a turn-off that it will keep them from buying an electric car.

And if the cost of upgrading neighborhoods is dumped on electric car owners, it could change the ROI equation substantially.

@Euphonious_Polemic

Level 2 charging on a 30 amp draws as much as a stove or dryer. We’re not talking about a dramatic increase in household needs here. Every house on the block will not necessarily be charging at the same time.

This argument is just not operational.

Your stove runs for maybe an hour or two per day at most, and they don’t run at the same time. Dryers run even more infrequently, and even less coordinated in time with neighbors.

And yes, you are talking about a dramatic increase in home needs. In 2019, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,649 kWh. A level 2 charger consumes about 19 kW of power. If you charge 4 hours per night, 365 days per year, that’s over 27,000 kWh per year. That’s almost TRIPLE the average U.S. home energy consumption. Even if you only charge half that amount, you are almost doubling your home energy consumption.

When one person in 20 does it, it’s manageable. Once there are several such vehicles in a city block, in many areas the infrastructure will have to be upgraded. In some cases it’s not just the local distribution transformer, but even the wiring and other hardware may have to be upgraded. In rural areas, entire new infrastructure may be required.

[Sam_Stone]

@DSeid

Funny enough the argument can be flipped on its head.

A source cited in the battery thread for its being a great resource about energy storage options has this to say (page 73 box 1):

There are many problems with this - the primary one being that people may not be happy to find that their car not only didn’t topmup overnight, but its battery was depleted to keep the grid stable. That could probably be solved by paying car owners to do it and allowing them to opt out easily on says when they absolutely must have a certain charge by morning.

Another problem is that peak demand is in daytime, and the cars charge at night.

But sure, there are potential upsides far down the road. But the downsides are real and shouldn’t be downplayed just because we really, realky like the tech.

[Dewey_Finn]

@Sam_Stone

Many neighborhoods were and are designed with 60 amp services going to the homes, but with an assumption that on average each home is only using a fraction of that power.

But note that the grid itself in this example can only handle about 25% penetration of electric vehicles, assuming they are all charging at night. Smart charging that coordinates the vehicles on a distribution transformer to prevent overloading could increase that number somewhat, but at the expense of taking control of charging away from the people who own the cars and may have their own needs,

So yes, the grid capacity is going to be a problem long before we get to 50% of light duty vehicles being electric.

Presumably over the next decade or two, the grid will be upgraded to support widespread EV ownership. For a comparison, look at the broadband marketplace. Twenty years ago, the best I could get was a crappy DSL connection from AT&T, but now, really fast internet is widely available even in rural areas, and where I live, there are multiple options for fast internet.

[PastTense]

The uses for electricity have vastly increased since electric utilities first started and consequently the grid has consequently been regularly increased in size to handle these uses. For example starting back in the 1950s and 1960s a big new luxury item was added to American homes called air conditioning. So adding EVs to the grid is not something unique.

[Sam_Stone]

@Dewey_Finn

Presumably over the next decade or two, the grid will be upgraded to support widespread EV ownership. For a comparison, look at the broadband marketplace. Twenty years ago, the best I could get was a crappy DSL connection from AT&T, but now, really fast internet is widely available even in rural areas, and where I live, there are multiple options for fast internet.

Your comparison actually disproves your point. Broadband got wide distribution because it was able to to piggyback on existing cable and phone lines with minimal new hardware. Many places which couldn’t support that STILL don’t have broadband, and the Internet as a popular commercial service has been around for thirty years.

We’re just getting fiber into our neighborhood now, for example. And we live in a large city. Rural internet is still terrible. In the U.S. only about 30% of homes have access to fiber internet, and in many places the only choice is DSL being run over 100 year-old copper wires.

The problem has only gotten worse with time. Major infrastructure projects now are much harder to build because of regulations, political partisanship, corruption, etc. We are decades behind on many infrastructure needs, and large projects are endlessly stalled and slow to move.

[DSeid]

@Sam_Stone

There are many problems with this - the primary one being that people may not be happy to find that their car not only didn’t topmup overnight, but its battery was depleted to keep the grid stable.

I limited the amount I quoted but discussed clearly in context.

effectively addressing this opportunity involves accounting for customers’ preferences, distribution grid constraints and local renewable energy availability in order to optimise electric mobility and energy use in a smart way. In this context EVs are charged under a framework where information is exchanged among different stakeholders in real time and the security of supply is maintained while meeting mobility needs and EV user requirements

In short it is trivial to have an app that specifies what charge level the driver wants to have the vehicle at, at what time, and of course to offer an incentive discount on the electricity consumed based on how much the vehicle was used by the grid. Consumers would also have to have transparent information on what impact such use might have on battery longevity, which would be different I suspect for allowing a vehicle to cycle between 60 and 40 repetitively than charging up to full and to empty fewer times but same total electricity making the round trips.

The bigger issue is having the smart technology deployed.

Real world usage though. Level 2 charging is typically about 6.6 kW in an hour, enough for roughly 25 miles. Many of us only charge once every several days and averaging a dozen hours of charging a week covers us. Less than two hours a night if we charged each night. We don’t need to be topped off each night and are led to believe that staying 25 to 75% would be ideal.

Most states have plenty of generation capacity at troughs and apps that allow charging at lowest rate i.e. lowest demand times with pricing variable based on real time factors are also easy to create and implement.

The model of course includes the possibility of public charging used by those who charge mostly at night but plug during the day to allow their battery to be used down to an agreed level for money back.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Sam_Stone

I’m not talking about ‘the grid’. I’m talking about things like capacity on neighborhood distribution transformers, old neighborhoods with sub-standard wiring, etc.

“The grid” includes residential distribution.

Yes, I’m sure there are some older neighborhoods that could use an upgrade. This is easy. It’s something that’s already done constantly, to replace failing equipment if nothing else. If a neighborhood transformer is overloaded, replace it with a beefier one.

@Sam_Stone

but at the expense of taking control of charging away from the people who own the cars and may have their own needs

That does not have to be the case, nor is it even likely. In fact there’s no actual coordination that has to take place, and existing cars already have nearly all the functionality they need. You simply tell the car to charge at the slowest reasonable rate, to start at X o’clock at night and to be done by Y o’clock in the morning. For most people, this will result in their cars charging at close to Level 1 rates. For the odd person that drove a lot that day, no big deal, their car gets the extra juice.

And again, many or most people live in places where the grid is sized for summer A/C use. That is way more watts than an EV needs at night for average American use.

60 amp service isn’t unheard of, but less than 100 is uncommon.

@Sam_Stone

One of the key concepts in engineering is that you look for low hanging fruit first, solve the big problems first, find the show-stoppers first, and in general you order your solutions in terms of cost-benefit.

Electric ground transportation is the low-hanging fruit. The vehicles are already awesome, just a little expensive upfront and there are some easy infrastructure issues to work through. No one is claiming that we don’t also have to do a ton of other stuff, like fully decarbonizing electrical generation.

The high-up fruit is long-haul aircraft and a bunch of other stuff. Some of these don’t have obvious solutions at all. Which makes doing the easy stuff that much more important.

@Sam_Stone

But what does that say about predictions of the economic harms from global warming in 80 years?

I don’t trust those models either. But let’s not confuse poorly-modeled economic harms with physical reality. The predicted direct effects of climate change, such as average temperatures, sea level rise, ocean acidification, etc., have been on the money. And we are starting to see the first hints of the economic effects such as wildfires and more damaging hurricanes. Plus it is simple and obvious that if the ocean rises by X, it will displace (poor) people living less than X above the current sea level.

There is no way to argue that these will not be extremely costly, even if one doesn’t trust any particular set of numbers.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Sam_Stone

A Tesla Model 3 long range takes FIFTY hours to charge on a level 1 charger.

Completely irrelevant. The math is easy: the average person drives 13,500 miles per year, or 37 miles per day. A reasonably efficient EV gets 4 mi/kWh, and so needs 9.25 kWh/day. If there are 10 nighttime hours to charge, the EV needs <1000 W. This is just not that significant. The daily amount is about two loads in an electric drier.

[Gorsnak]

Electrical transformers have a design life of 25-40 years. Passenger vehicle fleet turnover is something over 15 years. Even if zero ICE vehicles were sold after 2030, a large majority of transformers currently in service will have been replaced by the time we approach a 100% EV fleet. I would expect the transition to be gradual enough that almost all grid enhancement required can be done as part of regular maintenance.

[Dr.Strangelove]

@Gorsnak

Electrical transformers have a design life of 25-40 years

Plus, there are something like 40 million distribution transformers in the US. This large number is an advantage, not a disadvantage: it means there’s already a huge infrastructure for repairing and replacing them (over a million per year given the lifetime), including a large supply of trained workers. If some fraction of transformers start reaching end-of-life a bit early, it’s no big deal. The demand will increase smoothly and there will be time to train new people and increase production. And of course transformers are easy to recycle/refurbish, since the way they go bad is that the oil is contaminated, or the insulation breaks down, or the windings become loose, etc. But they’re still big hunks of steel and copper that can be 100% recycled or reused.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@Gorsnak

I would expect the transition to be gradual enough that almost all grid enhancement required can be done as part of regular maintenance.

Exactly right. This is just one of the “fails” of the argument that the grid, or local transformers cannot handle what amounts to an additional clothes dryer in households. It’s going to be a relatively slow transition, which can be planned out.

Dr. Strangelove also nailed the foolishness of the argument that a Tesla needs 50 hours to charge on a Level 1 charger. Even the folks who SELL Level 2 chargers admit that many people will not need them, as level 1 charging overnight will give them plenty of miles of range per day. It’s not common that every single car in a neighbourhood is travelling more than 100km per day, every day, after all.

Sam is doing a good job though, of bringing up these old talking points in a reasonable manner.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

Incidentally, BC Hydro, which supplies electricity to 6 million or so, sees no problem at all with the upcoming shift to EV’s. They are planning for it.

[Procrustus]

@Euphonious_Polemic

Incidentally, BC Hydro, which supplies electricity to 6 million or so, sees no problem at all with the upcoming shift to EV’s. They are planning for it.

Puget Sound Energy, my local provider, is actively encouraging the switch to EVs. Of course, they want to sell the electrons, but I doubt they’d be pushing it if they couldn’t handle it. We get an EV newsletter and everything.

[Dewey_Finn]

I doubt there is any electric utility not planning for widespread adoption of EVs.

[Gorsnak]

“There might be more demand for our product in the future! We must prevent this from happening!” said no CEO ever.

[Sam_Stone]

Hey, if we’re talking 25-40 years before the grid will be fully ready, that’s fine. But it’s not helping global warming much in the interim.

My point was not that electric cars are bad, but we have to be careful not to hype them as a major solution to global warming, because they aren’t. Switching to all electric cars won’t even come close to offsetting the increase in demand for power over that time, and neither will solar and wind.

[Dewey_Finn]

Well, it’s going to be 25-40 years before we’re at 100% adoption of EVs. It’s a long, slow process.

[DSeid]

@Sam_Stone

there are potential upsides far down the road. But the downsides are real and shouldn’t be downplayed just because we really, realky like the tech.

@Euphonious_Polemic

Incidentally, BC Hydro, which supplies electricity to 6 million or so, sees no problem at all with the upcoming shift to EV’s. They are planning for it

These two statements are however completely compatible with each other.

There are, if not “downsides” minimally potholes, in the road ahead. They do need to be thought of and planned for.

So while the transition overall will be fairly gradual it will also be lumpy. Some neighborhoods, some blocks even, may adopt earlier than others. EV adoption can be concentrated and several plugging in at roughly the same time to top off as they get home in the evening each night could be a problem even though all of them are only charging for an average of two hours or less each night. Implementing “smart charging”, motivating charging to be done in troughs of local demand, is essential. The pothole is easy to drive around but it does need to be seen and responded to.

[Procrustus]

@Sam_Stone

My point was not that electric cars are bad, but we have to be careful not to hype them as a major solution to global warming, because they aren’t. Switching to all electric cars won’t even come close to offsetting the increase in demand for power over that time, and neither will solar and wind.

I’m not sure we get a lot of people saying EV’s will be “a major solution to global warming.” I hear a lot of “they are great cars to drive and and reduce carbon emissions. They are therefore part of the solution.”

[DSeid]

And they are relatively low hanging fruit.