When the Al Gore wired the nation for the (dial-up) internet, there were some problems. “The System” was designed to have a bunch of people on the phone 24/7.
Well, it takes a long while to recharge an electric car. Would the widespread, sudden, use of plug-ins overload the electrical system?
No, because most of the recharging will be happening overnight, when the grid is running well below capacity anyway. In fact, you’ll probably soon (if you aren’t already) start seeing differing rates from the electric company at different times of day, or even different rates hour-to-hour or minute-to-minute, and appliances (such as car chargers) which track those rates and use power only when it’s cheap.
I hope some others more knowing than myself chime in here, because I think it’s an important question that we, as humanity, have to answer.
We’ve used petroleum based transport for a looong time. Cost effective and efficient. The infrastructure is in place. Huge investment there.
Clearly, something is going on with gas prices and even food prices because of ethanol production diverting what used to be food…
I know this is GQ looking for cites and facts, so I’ll say for a fact that I’ve been in places that couldn’t supply electricty for air conditioning when it was 110F, much less the energy stored in a couple gallons of gas sitting in the driveway.
This is nothing against solar, wind, bikes, whatever, but despite what T. Boone Pickens hopes, we’re in for interesting times.
Chronos,
I hope you are right, but the engineer in me thinks that things don’t always scale as planned for. It’s one thing when 100 folks plug their Prius in at night, and another when 100,000,000 do. That’s my concern.
I can’t find a cite that represents how much energy enters a “typical” city by pipeline or truck, vs that produced by local power companies. Even allowing for greater efficiencies of electric vs gas, moving a ton of food from here to there takes substantial energy. There ain’t no free lunch.
I heard an interview with a rep from grid handling the NW section of the US. She said that they were working with the auto companies to design a “smart charge” that would help with the recharge cycle occurring predominantly in the off-peak hours and that doing so would actually make the use of the grid more efficient. She said that the existing grid was capable of handling all anticipated demand for this type of charging. She also said that charging during peak period was not expected to cause huge problems, but it would be a lot more expensive.
There in lies the question…just what’s “anticipated”? 5%? 10%? 95%? 200% :dubious:
The OP asked about a sudden switch to electric…
However, this type of low-load time factors into planning for maintenance and load balancing; if we’re now running a higher load more consistently (and the load required for charging a true electric car for long distance commuting) then there very well may be exceedences in what can be sustained long term. Of course, hybrids are a niche market right now, and the amount of storage capacity in them isn’t that large, but as/if more demand is placed on the electrical distribution infrastructure for transportation more of the weaknesses that have caused regional blackouts in the last few years will be revealed.
This isn’t really a bad thing; “The Grid”, such as it is, is an ad hoc, patched together network of systems that interface just well enough to work, mostly. Long term, it really does need to be upgraded for higher transmission and storage efficiency, greater robustness and modularity, and the greater capacity that will be demanded of it in the next few decades, so this may be the impetus for investing in that on a national level with a structured, organized plan. And I agree that both markets and appliances will become smarter about using energy more efficiently, i.e. providing better rates and uses at non-peak times. (I just wish that new construction and building codes would encourage more energy efficient housing to reduce static peak loads for heating and cooling, a major and completely needless waste of energy.) But as demand for electric power for transportation grows the liabilities of the existing infrastructure will continue to be exacerbated.
Stranger
Just a thought to add, that if we all woke up to find a shiny new electric car in our driveway (instead of a rebate check), the grid would collapse when they were plugged in. :smack:
I don’t think there will be a big problem with existing capacity if coordinated properly but as some mentioned here the time of day when charging occurs is critical. Charging large numbers of the vehicles between 3 and 7 pm on hot summer days could possibly overwhelm the system. Shifting that task to pre-dawn hours would work for most systems.
The bigger concern is the possible change in system load factor. Most power systems are planned to have generation called base load that is on all of the time (expensive to build but cheaper to fuel) like coal plants. Base load generation is complemented by peaking plants, generation that is on part of the time (cheap to build but expensive to fuel) like gas generator turbines.
Even with coordination of charging the load could eventually climb well above base load capacities which would force the producers to rush to build base load plants. But base load plants can take as long as ten years to build so the producers would be forced to run expensive peak units around the clock until more base load is available.
So I see a gradual shift to electric fueled transportation as a problem but not one that is a deal breaker. The amount of strain is a factor or the rate at which the changeover occurs.
Bubba
Guy who used to plan power systems for a living
I think there’s no question that “the widespread, sudden, use of plug-ins” would throw kinks into the electrical systems in many parts of the country. Good thing that this is not going to happen.
The proper answer to the real world question of the increase in electric vehicles is that nobody knows, but the electric utilities are seriously worried.
Many areas of the country, and the northeast in particular, have ancient and in some ways antiquated grid systems. Electric use is growing every year just because more people use more products that require electricity. We’ve added a few hundred million computers, large-screen TV’s, espresso machines, and dozens of other appliances to average home. Air conditioning is far more widespread than in earlier decades. Houses are larger and use more light bulbs. Every addition to the average household requires a drain on the system.
Getting new power plants built has been a struggle everywhere, because nobody wants a power plant in their backyard. Even if they’re willing to put it into someone else’s backyard, they aren’t willing to allow large electric lines to go though their backyards to get the power from the plant to the consumer. These are huge everyday battles for utilities.
Utilities have spent years looking at replacing their antiquated power meters with “intelligent” ones that can charge by time periods, to encourage people to use more power at what are now lower usage times.
Then there’s the issue of house wiring. Do you need 120 or 240 to run plug-ins? Do older houses have the amperage at their circuit boxes to handle this additional load?
It’s not simply a question of whether you plug in your car at a certain time. It’s that this is potentially a huge additional load at a time when the utility system in the country is already in poor shape. It’s much like the world food situation. There is lots of food, but a huge problem in distributing the proper amounts of food to the right people at the right places at the right times for prices they can afford. The food system fails at that task today. The electric system is barely managing it. You don’t need to imagine apocalypse to put high odds on failures to that system. Assumed growth will probably accomplish it. A large additional load that they hadn’t planned for almost certainly will. Failures *to * the system are not the same as a failure *of * the system, but they’ll still be inconvenient and uncomfortable for large numbers.
Nowadays, one should also consider sporadic generation capability. Windmills (and possibly solar, eventually) can deliver low operating costs for average power, but they’re not reliable: Sometimes they’re running at full capacity, and sometimes they’re not running at all, with no way to control which is when. With the right control infrastructure in place, this could mesh nicely with battery charging: When the wind is blowing strongly, the power company that owns the windmills could instantaneously lower the rates, and communicate that lowering to consumers’ chargers, and then raise the rates again instantaneously as the wind dies down. The consumers, meanwhile, would set their chargers to minimize the cost of electricity used, subject to other constraints. The power companies could then manage the loads however they wanted, at least to the extent that there are loads on the grid that can be time-shifted like this.
Where do you charge all these plug-ins at? I live in an apartment. Would the landlord be expected to put a series of electrical outlets at each parking spot in the lot on the chance that someone buys a plug-in hybrid? I don’t think they’d be happy if I ran several hundred feet of extension cord to reach my car from inside my apartment either.
What percentage of car owners own their own private parking spot, such as a garage, that they can run power to their car?
No, when they get home at night they’ll be able to plug into the solar cells on their roof.
Good one magiver. I read it twice before I got it. 
Yeah. My mistake. I thought this was a question of something that was possible. :smack:
Around 70% of US families live in homes they own. This probably understates car ownership, since in my experience home owners are far more likely to own two, three, or several cars than apartment dwellers. Some renters rent homes rather than apartments as well. This probably puts 80% of cars in homes owned by the family.
It is a real and as yet answered question what the remaining 20% will do.
Already happening (sortof). I pay a lower price for electricity all summer, because I allowed the electric company to install a device that can turn off the power to my air conditioner for 1/4 of each hour during periods of peak demand.
Here in Minnesota, with our winters and engine block heaters being quite common, the better apartment buildings already have electric outlets at the parking spots.
Will the grid become any more reliable? Out here, any good storm will knock out the power to my house for a few hours, and if a car is supposed to be charging then it would significantly impact the people out here’s ability to rush into town during or for some time after the outage. Given that some people out here can be on call 24/7 and need to be able to rush into town on a moment’s notice day or night, I don’t think plug-in hybrids are a viable solution and I don’t know that they will be for the foreseeable future.
That’s what the gasoline is for. Remember, these are still hybrids we’re talking about, not pure-electric vehicles. Presumably, such storms are rare enough, and the people who are always on-call few enough, that you’d still see a significant decrease in fuel consumption.
Still, that’s not the norm in the US or even Europe that I’m aware of. (Scandanavia , probably, possibly? My ignorance is showing. :o )