Can the existing power grid handle very many electric cars? With posts mentioning 34kw batteries in the cars, that’s 34kw that’ll have to come off the grid. Start multiplying and it seems like you’ll need another power plant for what, every 60,000 cars?
Granted, we are a long way from even having 60,000 cars, but if they become popular/practical looks like the power grid will need to be bolstered.
The polution/carbon footprint of power plants vs internal combustion has already been covered, I’m thinking more along the lines of extra power output needed just to charge the cars.
34KW battery does not make a whole lot of sense. Watt is a unit of power and generally with batteries you are interested in the amount of energy they hold. You can charge fast or slow this will vary your how much power you draw from the grid. If you draw low power it will take longer to charge. If cars are charged at night I don’t think they will put anymore strain on the grid at all.
The above link shows the daily electric grid usage for California. At 3 am the amount of electricity used is down by about 30% from peak use. If cars are charged at night timers can be used to ensure that they are charged during the low periods. If the electric companies charge differently during the course of the day then this will encourage people to charge their cars at night when it is cheap.
Duke remember that cars would mainly be charged overnight, at current off peak hours when current plants have large amounts of unused capacity. (Some have even proposed that EVs could be used to put power back into the grid for home consumption during peak surge periods daytime.)
If any one has the knowledge to answer RivereRunner then please also factor in the energy costs of exploration and drilling and transport as well as that of refining.
Hmmm. I live in a one bedroom apartment, in a building with 28 units in it. We park in the parking lot provided, over to the side of the building.
How would I charge this car? 200ft extension cord?
If they install power outlets to each parking stall, then they’ll need to provide a way to prevent unauthorised folks from stealing power. (If I leave my car plugged into my outlet overnight, metered by the power meter assigned to my apartment, then someone could come along, unplug my car, and plug their own in there.)
How long is the recharge time? Long distance trips would be a hassle if you have to take a multihour rest stop every 200 miles of driving…
The answer is most likely some kind of solar cell.
On the issue of outdoor plugins, I’ll note that in Canada, electrified parking stalls are ubiquitous (for block heaters). Perhaps it’s just our legendary (mythical?) courtesy, but I’ve never seen someone not use their own plug in and steal someone else’s power.
Sorry, my mistake on the battery capacity. Here’s where I got the number, but I left “h” off by accident.
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Still seems like if the battery has a given capacity, that same amount will have to be added back into it. The same post said that 35kwh would give 130 miles. I don’t drive anywhere near 130 miles a week, barely 130 miles a month, so an additional 35kw (h?) a month on my electric bill wouldn’t be any great burden. Seems like last month’s bill was for 1050kw (h?). I have a feeling I’m hardly a typical driver, however.
The short answer is that the current infrastructure is not designed to allow apartment dwellers (nor homeowners who have to park on the street) to recharge electric vehicles. But there are enough people who live in private homes with garages to make a viable market for a plug-in electric vehicle.
(I also live in an apartment building, except there are no individual meters and I park in a private garage space with an outlet for the garage door opener. So while I could plug in an electric car, I don’t think it would fair to the landlord to do so.)
I talked this over with a coworker, and he suggested that we could have lockable outlets, with covers that have a small slit cut in them that allow the body of the charging cable through, but too big for the molded plug/prong assembly to get pulled out or inserted without unlocking it and opening the cover. :smack:
And absolutely people would “steal” electricity from their neighbors! hehe… They do it now! (They also steal cable TV, too. The apartment I live in has a utility shed where the power, phone, and TV services are seperated out for each apartment unit, and they meter the power there. Each tenent pays for their own services.)
Well, have you ever noticed that in the 1980’s, nobody had cable TV, and now every apartment has a cable hookup?
And that the local government has managed for 50 years to keep parking meters on every sidewalk in the city?
If there’s profit to be made, companies will lay lots and lots of cables, and install lots of “parking meters”. With today’s technology, it would be no problem to have a batter charger/plugin set on a short pole at each parking spot. All new cars have computers in their engines, so after you plug the car into the charger,a credit-card swipe, or a cell-phone call, could activate it, and then bill the license number of your car.
Another option – one my Dad often talks up – is to “charge” your car by going to a filling station and swapping out your car’s spent battery (of modular design) with a fully charged one. The filling station would have a number of identical batteries on the charger at any given time. It’s much like the system we had for laptop computers at the library where I used to work.
A point is that a small company going from zero is able to build and market an electric car ,but a major corporation is unable to do it over a long time. It requires the will. They have not shown a serious desire to do it.
The problem with that is that batteries can be damaged, and batteries have a finite lifespan. That means the service station has to absorb the cost of replacing batteries as they wear out, which means pricing it into the ‘swap’ price. It also means that batteries have to be of indentical design, which stifles innovation and limits the way in which people can design cars.
It also means there would be no incentive for people to take care of their batteries, which is one of the primary ways that battery life can be extended.
No, it means a small company can build a small, single-purpose electric vehicle that costs $100,000 and appeals to a very small market. There’s a big difference betweent that and building a mass-market vehicle that has decent range, cargo capacity, four seats, and costs $20,000.
No one has said it’s impossible to build an electric car. All the major manufacturers have built them. What’s very hard to do is to build a practical, multi-purpose electric car that is affordable for the general public.
Your statement is like saying that since Cessna can build a 2-place personal jet that costs $2,000,000, the major aircraft manufacturers could build us all $30,000 private jets if only they had the willpower.
Couple of problems with this (besides what Sam came up with). First, do you have any idea how heavy these things are? Couple of hundred pounds at least. It would be a major under taking unless battery technology some how takes quantum leap in the very near future to remove the drained batteries and then swap in fully charged replacements. Bit more than simply putting in a nozzle into the tank of your car.
Which leads to the second problem…standardization. You’d have to basically not only come up with some kind of standard battery size, shape and interface but force all the manufactures to comply to that standard (since they will all make things there way until some kind of defacto standard emerges). Otherwise your friendly electric refueling station not only would have to stock various sizes and types of battery but also have to have the trained personnel in order to swap them out of various types.
Which brings us to another problem…those trained technicians (with gorilla like arms to move all these heavy batteries). Either that or the huge capital investment in some kind of robotic automation (this is at your local fueling station mind you).
Doesn’t seem very practical to me. I’d say a better way is to either come up with a fast charging, long lived battery or go for the Mr. Fusion solution…
This comment deserves both a :rolleyes: AND a for the totality of your lack of understanding.
Aside: yes, kilowatt-hours - the number of hours in the month times your average kilowattage. More exactly, the sum of all the different power demands you’ve made over the month, each demand expressed as the power you were drawing multiplied by the time you were drawing it for.
Small batteries (for models, cameras etc) tend to be marked in milliamp-hours: you multiply by the nominal voltage of the battery if you want to know milliwatt-hours.
For those who think GM and the oil companies killed the electric car, a question:
Why would the Japanese go along with the plot?
The Japanese have no oil, and they have no major oil producing companies. Electric cars would be a blessing for them. They also have numerous top-notch electronics firms (Matsushita, Sanyo, Sony, et al.) that could make a fortune producing them. So, why didn’t THEY churn out electric cars for domestic consumption, if those cars are as wonderful as Ed Begley Jr. insists?
A small company can risk just going bankrupt if it fails. If GM tries this, they would need to run it as an independent operating unit that could file for bankruptcy in case of failure, in hopes of not dragging down the firm.
The nature of public firms can, at times, discourage risk taking.
I wondered this, too. Honda, in particular, would seem to be an ideal company for this sort of project. They’re privately held, have the manufacturing capability, and have demonstrated exceptional engineering expertise.
for the totality of your lack of understanding.