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.
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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.
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...).