The Problem with Electric Vehicles
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The Problem with Electric Vehicles
1–10 of 205 posts
Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles
#2I 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
#3Hmm. All problems that could have been set at the door of internal combustion when it was new. They'll be solved as EVs make up a larger percentage of what's on the road.
Are EVs the endgame? I suspect not. Apart from anything else I think it's going to prove far, far harder to replace trucks than buses and cars with EVs.
Would we be better investing in public transport that's convenient and reliable enough people want to use? Certainly. But we like personal vehicles. They're not going to go away easily.
In fact just like horses and steam trains became a leisure pursuit, I suspect ICEs will also become something for play. The old v8 classic, the motorbike, the quad. You might have increasing difficulty getting fuel, so start lugging 5g jerry cans around in your EV to fuel the Mustang weekend toy. EVs can't beat the soul and sound of a v8 or Triumph triple.
Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles
#4I 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.
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
#5I 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.
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.
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
#6I 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.
$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
#7This was why I thought the Chevy Volt had the right idea; having a gas-tank there as a backup, but depend on electricity 95% of the time.
But, in my opinion, the best thing to do is to move to a big city and use the trains, or campaign for a good train system in your city, which obviously can't work for everyone.
Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles
#8I 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.
$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.
Gas is $2 right?
Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles
#9OK, it boils down to "if all cars will be electric, we'll need much more electricity".
There are only two ecologically sustainable ways of increasing generating capacity: solar and nuclear. Both will be deployed on massive scale.
The new atomic age awaits us!
Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles
#10I 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.
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%."