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Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by phkahler on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:46AM (#11422247)
I think this guy over estimates how much burden electric cars will put on the grid. For a round trip of 20 miles to work and an efficiency of 200 Watt-hours per mile, you get 8kWh which can be charged slowly at 1kW over 8 hours. Think of that in comparison to air conditioning or electric dryers.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by toomuchtodo on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:59AM (#11422340)
I can't find the paper, but the US DOE has a report from 10 years ago that ~77%~ 84% of light vehicles (cars) can be moved to the electric grid using existing generation resources.

Consider that wind and solar installations are accelerating (and that wind is so cheap in parts of Texas, its free at night!) and I can assure you, there is no electrical grid burden.

EDIT: Citation

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-n...

"The UK Department of Transport and teh Royal Academy of Engineering (2010) have both estimated that if the UK switched to battery electric vehicles, electricity demand (kWh) would rise about 16%. The US Electric Power Research Institute modeled 60% of US vehicle use being electric and found a 9% increase in electricity demand. As can be seen from the graphs above, this need not increase the system's peak capacity if most charging is off-peak, thereby greatly increasing the proportion of total generating capacity supplied by base-load plant – see below. A study conducted by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the US Department of Energy in 2006 found that the idle off-peak grid capacity in the USA would be sufficient to power 84% of all vehicles in the USA if they all were immediately replaced with electric vehicles. Areva has calculated that if 10% of cars in France were electric it would increase base-load demand by more than 6000 MWe ("four EPRs", or 10% of nuclear capacity). In the above diagrams, assuming significant move to electric cars mostly charged off-peak, the base-load demand is increased by about 35%."

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:08AM (#11422430)
Not sure why you are downvoted, but 77% of light vehicles does not equate to 77% of total consumption. 77% of the light vehicles are likely exactly that 77% that is used rarely, it's just the Pareto principle at work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle , the bulk of the consumption will be done by a relatively small number of consumers. And so a very large number of those consumers could be converted to electricity without much impact on the grid or generating capacity but that would not be a huge impact on total consumption of fossil fuels.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by NLips on Monday April 04, 2016 @12:38PM (#11423232)
"77% of the light vehicles are likely exactly that 77% that is used rarely"

I won't use the word 'extraordinary', but that's at least a strong claim, so needs strong evidence to back it. Why wouldn't 77% of vehicles mean 77% of the load?

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Monday April 04, 2016 @12:48PM (#11423319)
I don't think that it is that strong a claim at all, not all vehicles are used to the same degree by their owners, every second hand car website can tell you that.

Cars that are 5 years old can have anywhere from 20K to 300K km on them. It all depends on the usage.

Lots of good data here:

http://www.solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php

People using their cars for 50K to 70K km per year are not exceptional (professional use), private individuals using their cars for < 5K km per year are not exceptional either.

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by NLips on Monday April 04, 2016 @02:16PM (#11424030)
You didn't claim 'not all vehicles are used to the same degree by their owners'. You claimed that if a report says 77+% of cars could be electric using the current grid, it probably means the least-used 77%. That's the strong claim.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Monday April 04, 2016 @02:42PM (#11424262)
It's the claim that makes most sense. You'd take the least used vehicles because their usage patterns will match current production EV sweet spots best (always assuming we are talking 100% electric and not hybrids).
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:06AM (#11422406)
It's a simple function of the total power required to get the current levels of transportation converted to electrical use. Whether that's 1 trip of 200 miles or 10 trips of 20 does not matter, in the end it is the total number of miles driven by everybody multiplied by the energy consumption per mile. That's a substantial amount of power, and I did what I could given the data that I could find to put a figure out that has some basis in fact. If you can improve on the number with hard data I'll be more than happy to update the post but comparing air conditioning and electric dryers to extra load on generating capacity and infrastructure is not helpful.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by _ph_ on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:30AM (#11422626)
But in most cases it is very easy to arrange charging when you are not running your electrical dryer or air conditioning, mainly in the late evening or night. It would be trivial to control your charger such that the total electricity drawn by your house connection never exceeds a set value.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:40AM (#11422707)
A typical hairdryer is about 1KW, it runs for a few minutes at most, similar to an electric kettle. AC units for domestic (normal sized houses) are from 2 to 5 KW, actual use depends on the temperature differential, humidity, the size of the house and any leakage.

Recharging a drained car battery would use as much power as running a large AC unit for 15 hours, but if the car has driven only a small distance it will use much less power. It all depends on the distance the car needs to drive (logically...).

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by maxerickson on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:55AM (#11422315)
$5000 of solar panels in the office parking lot and you get almost 0 draw from the grid for the commute.

I guess that doesn't compare favorably to $600 (~200*$3) per year for fuel, but it isn't real far out either.

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by mtgx on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:01AM (#11422352)
Solar installations will double every two years (globally), so let's hope that will be enough to keep up with EV growth.

I still think the bigger bottleneck will be the installation of chargers, though, even though it shouldn't be because they aren't that expensive. But Tesla is just one small car maker installing its own, and the other manufacturers don't seem all that interested in building them for the same reason they've been rather slow in pushing EVs on the market, too. I think governments should have a bigger role in building EV infrastructure.

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by maxerickson on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:24AM (#11422580)
I think the real issue is that the 1 charge range is not yet all that attractive, especially given the cost of the vehicles. As range goes up and price comes down, demand for chargers will increase (that demand can be coming from people who'd like to buy an electric, it doesn't have to be owners).
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by JoeAltmaier on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:58AM (#11422338)
Gas is $2 right?
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by toomuchtodo on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:00AM (#11422346)
Temporarily. You successfully tell me where oil prices are going to be in a year, and you'll be the richest person in the world.

http://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-char...

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by cubano on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:51AM (#11422807)
It seems unlikely that the price of gas will be able to go much higher than the US fracking break-even point, which seems to be around $25/bbl. [1]

But yes who knows...coming regulations may change that number significantly.

www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/12/crude-oil-price-still-crashing-toward-25-breakeven/

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by YesProcrast on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:27AM (#11422610)
Between $1 and $1000.

How do I collect?

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by maxerickson on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:30AM (#11422630)
Arbitrage the accuracy of your prediction against the oil futures market.

There's an implicit requirement for a useful prediction of the price in the GP comment.

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by maxerickson on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:04AM (#11422399)
Neither number is intended to be all that precise. In a sunny spot, the $5000 would probably be quite a bit more than 1 kilowatt of output. It should anyway probably be 250+ days, so I accidentally controlled for that error.

I would certainly factor the different cost structures in if I was doing the calculation for real (gas could be $4 in a couple years, who knows).

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by dev1n on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:49AM (#11422272)
This is all true. However, I think it would be better to put the strain on the grid than continue to do so with companies that squeeze oil out of rocks. The grid can utilize natural gas, coal, solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, wave power etc.. Electric cars are the future and will force us to invest heavily in renewable energy.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:52AM (#11422289)
Electric cars are actually more or less a natural sink for wind energy and solar because they add storage capacity to the grid, something it currently does not have.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by bebop on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:01AM (#11422354)
I have never thought about the fact that electric cars are really just portable batteries. You just blew my mind.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by toomuchtodo on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:00AM (#11422345)
Tesla is offering free electricity to Tesla owners in a Scandinavian country under this idea (excess energy is soaked up by the electric vehicles).
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:02AM (#11422374)
Scandinavian countries are the exception (and Canada could be) because of the amount of hydropower they produce.
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by toomuchtodo on Monday April 04, 2016 @11:03AM (#11422388)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/business/energy-environmen...

"A Texas Utility Offers a Nighttime Special: Free Electricity"

"The women are just three of the thousands of TXU Energy customers who are at the vanguard of a bold attempt by the utility to change how people consume energy. TXU’s free overnight plan, which is coupled with slightly higher daytime rates, is one of dozens that have been offered by more than 50 retail electricity companies in Texas over the last three years with a simple goal: for customers to turn down the dials when wholesale prices are highest and turn them back up when prices are lowest.

It is possible because Texas has more wind power than any other state, accounting for roughly 10 percent of the state’s generation. Alone among the 48 contiguous states, Texas runs its own electricity grid that barely connects to the rest of the country, so the abundance of nightly wind power generated here must be consumed here."

Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by pc2g4d on Monday April 04, 2016 @07:22PM (#11426575)
Trouble is they're not connected to the grid while you're driving them :-/ But excellent point nontheless
Re:The Problem with Electric Vehicles by jacquesm on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @03:14AM (#11428475)
If they would be you would not need batteries in the first place!