The British National Grid disagrees: https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero/ele...

"Does the electricity grid have enough capacity for charging EVs?

The most demand for electricity in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.

Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we believe demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.

The US grid is equally capable of handling more EVs on the roads – by the time 80% of the US owns an EV, this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.1

A significant amount of electricity is used to refine oil for petrol and diesel. Fully Charged’s video Volts for Oil estimates that refining 1 gallon of petrol would use around 4.5kWh of electricity – so, as we start to use less petrol or diesel cars, some of that electricity capacity could become available."

Parts of the US grid are barely able to handle the load today. Rolling blackouts have been used in some areas. There may be enough total capacity to handle more use, but peak demand levels are already straining the system.

power outages that aren't weather related are not increasing. https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/surging-weath...

Where did they say they were?

You may be referring to California who had issues last year during an historically high heat wave. This year, they are not having the same trouble. Part of the reason is that they increased production capacity since last year.

The main reason is that this summer has been much, much cooler in CA. In SV, for example, we've had a handful of days over 90 this year, whereas last year there were probably 20 days over 90 at this point in the summer. Our AC has only kicked on a few times all year, whereas last year it was on much more frequently.

There may have been increases in production, but it would have been shocking if we'd had rolling blackouts this year, given how mild the summer has been. Other parts of CA are warmer than SV, but AFAIK (having family in Sacramento and LA) this summer has been cooler than last summer all over CA.

California is very close to seeing blackouts right now. If there's another heat wave on the scale of last year, there will be blackouts again.

But that’s highly localized. And one of the most reported areas where this happens is Texas, who decided to roll their own grid, and is now paying the price for that stupidity.

I'm skeptical of a narrative where concern for the electrical grid's ability to handle load is only considered for EV growth over several years versus the air conditioning use in the current unprecedented heatwave.

Anecdotally, my A/C energy usage (compared to last year) far outweighs my energy usage in an EV.

Not to mention radical increases from demanding everyone switching to heat pumps plus demanding industry switch to electrified versions of everything too. It's seriously a complete fantasy to think the grid can happen all that with minimal upgrades.

Dominion Energy in Virginia has an even worse problem than EVs to worry about: datacenters

https://rga.lis.virginia.gov/Published/2022/RD216/PDF

If you scroll to page 66 of the PDF, it’s insane how much more demand is needed for datacenters. It completely dwarfs forecasted EV power usage.

The US is a huge exception, your power grid is from the age when cowboys roamed the lands. Literally.

There was a huge fire that was caused by a power line slowly mechanically wearing down its connector. OVER A HUNDRED YEARS. Nobody bothered to check or replace it.

Also you have exceptions for oil and gas pipelines. 1-2 permits on a high level and the land owners can pound sand if they complain.

For power lines you need levels on a dozen different levels and even after that everyone who can even see the power poles has the irrefutable right to veto said wire or at the very least sue and slow it down to a crawl...

It's weird how the US went from the "fuck it, let's visit the Moon" country to the "electricity stuff is too hard, wah" country. Snap out of it!

A) you can charge your EV at off-peak times.

B) the US electricity grid is uniquely unreliable for a developed country.

Also, this weekend in the UK https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/latest-fleet-news/electric-...

This question depends on the specifics of local energy generation, so you’re not going to get good answers without zooming in.

Japan’s electrical grid has some unique challenges that explain why they are so interested in hydrogen. An article about the UK isn’t all that relevant for that,

Talking about the US electrical grid as a single entity doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when it’s not a single, nationwide market. There can definitely be local problems as we saw in Texas and California.

Since when does Toyota only sell in England?

Or they gambled that there would be enough hydrogen generation and distribution, which seems like an even worse bet. It's not that they decided to stick with ICE, it's that they chose an even worse fuel source.

A lot of this is because of the Japanese government itself.

To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on China due to lack of natural lithium deposits, which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery tech moot.

To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would be the best bet due to

1. An early lead in hydrogen technology

2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen fuels

3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from carbon resources)

4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up.

These are a good overview -

1. Japan’s Hydrogen Industrial Strategy - https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...

2. Japan Hydrogen Basic Strategy - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-basic...

3. Basic Strategy for Hydrogen (the actual strategy paper. It's in Japanese) - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso...

Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy. What do you think of recent developments of high efficiency electrolysis of sea water without precious metal catalysts? [1]

Hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes as electric power can't generate temperatures high enough and hydrogen in the form of ammonia makes a pretty good energy storage system that does not need any special metals to use for power in a modified ICE. The sweet spot for ammonia engines seems to be long haul container shipping where batteries would be infeasible.[2]

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01195-x

[2]https://gcaptain.com/man-reaches-milestone-with-successful-t...

First, I want to stress that I'm a Policy Wonk turned Cybersecurity practitioner. Though I have a STEM education, I haven't touched chemistry or physics in almost a decade.

That said, this paper does look promising and it kind of reminds me of the heavy water electrolysis process used in Nuclear Energy.

Using saltwater instead of fresh+distilled water would be great, though I'm curious about the cost of productionizing this, as the kind of cost and energy outlay needed for this at scale might not be efficient.

That said, I am not a ChemE or Physicist so I could be wrong

> Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy.

Yep, but that will take time to build, hence the idea to use brown hydrogen in the meantime.

It's interesting that I just watched a video[0][1] on Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage.

Incidentally, I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan. They are completely and utterly dependent on the US for their national security, without any remaining meaningful popular movement to divorce themselves thereof. The Japanese Socialist party had some language about getting rid of the Anpo treaty, but hilariously, they backed out immediately when they came into power; the Japaense journalist / commentator Akira Ikegami wrote a (Japanese language) book [2] about this era that I thought was pretty enlightening.

[0] Fair notice: the person who runs the channel is an MA and former UI/UX engineer, so YMMV with how far you trust the content.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zG-ZrC4BO0

[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/%E6%B1%A0%E4%B8%8A-%E5%BD%B0-e...

> I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan

It's an issue the same way the US being dependent on Taiwanese Foundries even though they're an ally of our's.

Should some sort of a global commodities crunch occur (eg. hypothetically, China banning all exports of Rare Earth Metals), then prices are going to skyrocket in the global market because it will take 5-7 years for production to scale up in Australia, Bolivia, and the US.

For critical technologies, it's important to have some level of self reliance. This is why the US is now a net energy exporter, after getting burnt by the spike in commodity prices in 2005-2009 leading to a massive bipartisan push for fracking, natural gas, solar, Athabaskan oil sands projects w/ Harper's backing, etc.

Other large countries with limited rare metal supplies like Germany and India have modeled a hydrogen policy similar to Japan for this reason.

> Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage

I'm not a MatSE or Physicist so I can't speak to the viability of that. That said, I can assume that rolling out any sort of mining and refining infrastructure would take time to scale out.

For example, it took China 15-20 years and an extreme amount of Govt protectionism to become a leader in the rare metals space. It's not that China has more deposits than other countries - it's just that it wasn't cost effective for most other countries to match the prices China was providing.

Japan depends on continuously imported oil and gas.

The BIG difference for lithium batteries is that you need to import lithium only ONCE then you reuse/recycle.

And yes there's big big money at play, so lots and lots of FUD around lithium and geopolitics, the obvious difference with oil is nearly never mentionned thanks to oil money.

Also : https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-subsidize-half-of-c...

That's complete nonsense. Almost no lithium is recovered in recycling, and we will need a truly massive increase in virgin materials to even get the process started. It will be just as big of a problem as oil for a very long time to come.

Lithium and metal recycling doesn't exist on earth?

Wow that's some FUD, I didn't expect this one...

https://electrek.co/2023/03/02/tesla-cofounders-redwood-show...

"These packs weighed a total of half a million pounds, and Redwood managed over 95% efficiency in recovering important metals from them. This is incredibly high efficiency – especially compared to the 0% recycling efficiency of gasoline, the energy storage device for competing vehicles."

Note: I just took the first one from https://www.recyclingstartups.org/top/battery/

That’s the claim, but no such process has been implemented yet. At best we’re in the early stages. One thing to be aware is just how much BS there is around this topic. It is classic greenwashing and it is similar to the plastic recycling story.

> The batteries are valuable and recyclable, but because of technical, economic, and other factors, less than 5% are recycled today.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

Of course recycling 0.02 kg smartphone batteries is not viable, but 500 kg BEV batteries is (plus it's mandatory in lots of the world including where I live).

And the redwood process is in production since last year with so "no such process has been implemented yet" is just a blatant lie. Quantities are modest because number of BEV being scrapped is tiny due to their yound age.

Article you cite is from 2019, we're in 2023 in case you don't know.

And the BEV world moves really fast.

You should just stop continuously spreading FUD about BEV in all HN discussions, this is boring...

So it’s impossible at small scale, but suddenly it’s doable as large scale? A risky bet.

Also, the battery chemistries and pack structure are wildly different between different cars. One of the reasons why lead-acid batteries are recycled is because they’re always the same design. But it’s the Wild West in the BEV world. Nothing is the same between any two car models. How the recycling process could even work is not at all explained.

We heard this story before with plastic recycling. But then we found out that only pristine plastics can be recycled. The rest is just trash. In the li-ion battery world, you’re guaranteed to get a giant mishmash of different chemicals and metals in the end. It’s almost literally just battery shrapnel because they have to grind it all up to get at the metals. So it sounds a lot like the stories of plastic recycling.

More FUD, I'm starting to believe you're a hired PR pro.

Here is what the DOE experts think about scaling up battery recycling with a cool 2 billions dollars:

https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/lpo-offers-conditional-c...

"Redwood Materials will use both new and recycled feedstocks—comprised of critical materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt—to produce approximately 36,000 metric tons per year of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil for use as the anode current collector, and approximately 100,000 metric tons per year of cathode active materials"

"At full production capacity, the project’s anode copper foil and cathode active material output is anticipated to support the production of more than 1 million EVs per year,"

And this is only for one plant...

I'll believe any time DOE experts to judge wether an existing proven process is scalable or not over a continously FUD spreading forum poster.

And for your information lead-acid batteries are not all the same, see various electrolytes in AGM (fibers...), Gel, ...

Since when did we trust the government to give a correct answer on a complex technical subject? The person is just repeating what he was told.

There's no evidence anything of significance being recycled. All of this is projections of future recycling achievements.

Like I said, it's the same story as plastic recycling. No one should believe any of the claims made.

AGM and gel lead-acid batteries are recycled in a separate pathway compared to flooded lead-acid batteries. This is okay because there aren't that many variations and the chemistry is basically the same. Li-ion batteries on the other are effectively hundreds of different chemistries spread across many different packaging methods. It is a complexity nightmare and no one has given any answer as to how it will all be solved.

DOE has a good track record, better than a random forum "poster".

Evidence about recycling taking place has been given multiple times, you just choose to ignore it.

Ah then there's different lead acid battery recycling methods, you said the contrary in the post above ...

And since you obviously didn't read or learn anything about lithium battery recycling you make a fool of yourself.

DOE has no “track record.” It just funds things based on government policy.

Again, no evidence that this recycling is happening at scale. And given the enormous complexity of the problem, something no one has even bothered analyzing, it seems unlikely to be solvable anytime soon.

At this point, I can just proclaim that plastic recycling is 95% effective with the same amount of evidence. You’d have no choice but to believe me on this since you already believe the same thing about li-ion batteries.

Good point.

I brought up the oil aspect in my comments below, but because this was a battery tech related convo I decided to bring up the (relatively minor) lithium portion. Though the battery tech issue did play a role in Toyota's decision to develop the Prius and the Mirai

Japan's hydrogen strategy is definetly a reaction to oil shocks a la 2008 and 1973

Wrong. It is the smartest choice we can think of. It is batteries that is just an irrational reaction to oil shocks of the 2000s. Hydrogen is actually a fully sustainable idea and will eventually be adopted across the board. Batteries are just going to be a temporary stopgap.

I was responding to his point about Oil dependency.

His point is backwards. You want to switch to hydrogen if you want to avoid future crises. Batteries just create the same situation.

It's incredibly short-sighted to think like this. There will be a huge supply of hydrogen at some point in the future. This is due to it being the only truly sustainable energy storage technology. Nearly all others will have to be abandoned.

> in the future.

Yes, and that's where it will stay in the future. Unfortunately, we need solutions that exist in the present.

I thought it was that it’s a more efficient use of lithium to make one hundred hybrids instead of ten EVs?

I always think it’s weird to believe in either of those things (that we can’t make enough electricity, which can be made in like a dozen different ways whether coal, oil, gas, biomass, nuclear, hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, etc, and that there won’t be enough lithium, even tho lithium isnt burned up, is extremely plentiful from conventional sources plus can be practically extracted from the ocean not to mention recycled indefinitely) and then be like “therefore, since we’ll have unlimited fossil fuels, let’s make more fossil fuel cars.”

I kind of get it.

A) improving the eMPG (or is it MPGe?) of more cars on the road to reduce their fossil fuel consumption is better than giving a few cars zero-emission powertrains, courtesy of the 80-20 rule. (Hence the riddle about you having two cars you use equally and someone offering to magically take one from 40mpg to 1000mpg or the other from 10mpg to 40mpg - you are better off financially with taking the latter option.)

B) The infrastructure for fossil fuel mining is here but scaling up lithium mining is going to add new horrors to the environment and the developing world.

If you look at the amount of oil and gas that is extracted vs the amount of lithium that would we need to mine; it is like comparing the size of the Sun to Pluto. Mining lithium has downsides but there is just no way it could be as bad as oil and gas due to the orders of magnitude difference in quantities needed.

Are you talking about pure lithium quantities? Those are small indeed, but... the concentration of lithium in the ore mined is low (some mines work with 0.2% ore), so you need to move 500kg of rocks to mine 1kg of lithium.

Most “mined” lithium doesn’t come from ore but rather from brine.

Then where are all their Prime vehicles that have had a huge waitlist for years?

Toyota is just not delivering on the EV front at all. They could be cleaning up by stealing some of the Model Y customers back by selling a ton of RAV4s, especially the Prime versions.

Given that it takes about the same amount of electricity to refine a gallon of gasoline as it does to power an EV over the same distance an ICEV would travel on that gallon, I think electrifying transportation isn't going to be a big deal. The grid will evolve for changing patterns of consumption, just as it always has. Even if we made 100% of all new car sales today EV the grid could keep up.

But the gallon of gas isn’t refined in my neighborhood, every night. It’s made in a centralized location, in advance, and if for some reason that location loses power, another location will make it and distribute to my local gas stations.

“ and distribute to my local gas stations.”

If you are having a widespread, long term power outage, those gas pumps will not run due to not having electricity.

Do you live in an area that has frequent power outages, then maybe this would be a concern, but in most areas an outage is pretty rare and are short term. If your area has unreliable power, perhaps they should be putting more power transmission lines underground?

Yes, PG&E cuts power proactively via their PSPS program. It doesn't affect most gas stations though, as they are more centrally located and not in neighborhoods. I believe they have looked into burying transmission lines, but found it to be economically infeasible.

If your power grid is unreliable, then maybe work on fixing that rather than just giving up on climate goals.

Defeatism never accomplishes anything.

I'm not defeatist, just pointing out that it's an oversimplification to say "it takes as much electricity to refine a gallon of fuel" given that the refining process happens in industrial areas where electricity may well be more reliable and less expensive.

Agreed, the grid will need to adapt to the changing consumption pattern, but the capacity is a solved problem. And we're building much more anyway.

Personally, I've never found gas stations to be the beacon of reliability. They go down quickly in any kind of shortage situation. During the last ice storm here the local station ran out of gasoline in a couple days and diesel right after that. But I was able to buy propane without interruption, so that was good -- it doesn't rely on electricity to be dispensed. This is why my portable generators are now all dual fuel.

Keep in mind these “calculations” are based on biased data to help support the overall goals set forth by the leaders of the company.

and what "goal" would that be? to not sell cars and make money once the biggest markets all mandate them in under a decade?

Large companies have difficulty making changes. The reason is exactly that: the goal is to make money, and doing what has made heaps of money for heaps of time already always seems like the best option.

> The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the fact that though large innovators have some motivation to innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing so as new products will undermine their existing ones.

I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.

To continue to sell cars which are unreliable and have huge supply chains.

Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a much smaller supply chain, and require much less maintenance.

Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more than a few years in order to artificially create a market for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle export to most of the world except for the US.

I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that owning an old car in Japan is a significant status symbol.

Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up with manufacturing compatible parts?

The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US styling to make it even more difficult for third party parts.

It also lets them keep cranking out models people think are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.

Which calculations? What data? What biases? What goals?

Opel, Peugeot Sticking To Bicycles - Motorcars Will Never Have Enough Petrol Stations.

I've always argued this is a Field of Dreams problem. In that if you build it they will come. The electric will expand to meet demand.

Numbers that I saw recently: The largest US solar electrical generation plant right now is about 400MW. To electrify fast enough to get to about-as-close-to-net-zero-as-we-can-imagine by 2050, the US would need to build one of these plants and bring it online ...

... every two weeks.

The US installed 11.8GW solar last year. That is 453MW/every 2 weeks. :-)

Yes, that’s nameplate capacity, so you can’t count on solar to delivery the power to get us over the line by itself. But we are nearly on track to the net zero goal when you add in …

… wind.

Yes, because the grid is static and never can be expanded.

And peak demand is 24 hours a day :p

It is more likely to be contracted.

The grid is going to explode. Let's start with California. Because they're a large economy, a large population centre and a famously leading on environmental issues, they tend to run into scaling and environmental problems first.

Do you remember news about the California grid straining under the heat wave in 2022? The governor sent text messages to every Californian asking them to minimise their power usage? Power consumption across the state* reached 52GW.

Every April, by the rules of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each state receives submissions of new projects that people want to build and connect to the grid. Each of these is called a "Cluster". In April 2021, cluster 14 included a proposed 110GW of new power generation. This was so many submissions that the state couldn't even finish their legally mandated analysis of all of the proposed projects in time for the new submissions for April 2022, so they pushed Cluster 15 back to 2023 (approved by FERC). It's past April 2023 and Cluster 15 projects proposed 354GW worth of power. If we take that CA can produce 50GW now, and add clusters 14 and 15, that's a little over 10× our current maximum power generation. You could argue that maybe some of these projects won't get built, that always happens in every cluster, but the number of withdrawn applications is a smaller percentage than usual.

Estimates are that EVs will require us to double our current power generation.

The glut in new power construction is not a California-specific phenomenon. https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-proposes-intercon...

* technically across the California Independent State Operator, https://caiso.com , which is about 80% of California and also includes a tiny bit of Nevada for geographical reasons.

There's reason to think otherwise: Natural Gas is being replaced and is due to see price increases. It will likely be replaced by electricity (namely Heat-Pump HVAC systems, and induction cook tops).

In some states some developments aren't even hooked to the gas network, and the homes standards are such that electrification is the default.

You have to measure electricity demand over years, not months, because seasonal changes and or weather can really corrupt your data.

We're adding capacity to the grid literally every day, both at the transmission and distribution level. It's not going to 'contract'

This makes no sense to me. Take Los Angeles. Almost everyone has AC. If you can power AC, you can charge an EV, and the loads peak at different times. (AC peaks around 3pm, EV can peak anywhere from 7PM to 5AM depending on programming)

Blackouts can happen, but EV normally charge when power is cheapest and demand is lowest.

And so they decided to go for hydrogen? If there isn't enough electricity, that means hydrogen derived from fossil fuels. So their hydrogen take was even more evil that it first appeared.

This is pure spin. Toyota cannot make this claim for every region in the world where they sell cars. It is especially disingenuous when they have been pushing their hydrogen vehicles and there is not enough hydrogen production either, in any region, because it makes no sense to overproduce when there is no market.