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The Problem with Electric Vehicles

jacquesmattheij.com

131–140 of 205 posts

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#131
post #60
post #45

I have an electric car, a leaf. I also have solar power from Solar City. I live in sunny MA, where in the winter we average 15kWh generated to the summer we average 50kWh. My commute is 60 miles per day which is around 6-8kW depending in traffic and weather. Also, my local power is a mixture of nuclear and wind. So. Can we please stop rolling coal burning power plants into the electric car equation as if it is univer…

If you commute, I assume your car isn't at home during the daytime on weekdays and so can't actually use most of the energy you generate for charging. How much of the 6-8kW of charging you do actually comes from your solar panels, and how much comes from the grid and is simply subsidized by your power provider being forced to buy your power at retail prices?

Who's to say that the power I generate during the day isn't being used to charge my car. The grid is also a pretty useful battery.

It really doesn't take that long to charge the car after the commute. In winter, chances are that it's from municipal power, summer it's probably from my solar. Either way I'm offsetting my car use with clean, local power.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#132
post #45

I have an electric car, a leaf. I also have solar power from Solar City. I live in sunny MA, where in the winter we average 15kWh generated to the summer we average 50kWh. My commute is 60 miles per day which is around 6-8kW depending in traffic and weather. Also, my local power is a mixture of nuclear and wind. So. Can we please stop rolling coal burning power plants into the electric car equation as if it is univer…

I live in an apartment there is no way to plug in a car or build a solar panel. Basically without a means of owning an outlet no plugin hybrid is possible.

This is a much easier problem to solve. You can put solar wind on apartments and you can run outlets to the street. It just involves cooperation and a little group altruism. So... OK I see your point.

It could be done, with right incentives.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone had a horse these days, the environmental impact would be massive, from the infrastructure required to generate the food for them (there probably isn't enough land area in the world to grow enough grass), and the amount of methane they emit.

We do the same with cows and other animals we eat. Plus we feed billions of pets (for which we have no use). Someone will have to do the numbers, but it's possible that, at a small density, they're a green alternative for short distances. Plus it's easy to share them.

Even in the late 19th century, cities like London and New York had major problems dealing with the massive volume of dung that horses were leaving on the streets.

The population of New York City was 1.5 million people in 1890. It's 8.1 million today.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#134
post #46

Can somebody explain how are EV, and especially Tesla, batteries different from, say, my laptop batteries, which normally degrade to the point of being unusable within 4-5 years, and have to be replaced?

Better chemistry, sophisticated cell by cell monitoring, liquid cooling, more intelligent charging algorithms, etc.

While they may share some aspects, the two were designed for dramatically different a) price points, and b) use cases.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#135
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

"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?

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

#136
post #45

I have an electric car, a leaf. I also have solar power from Solar City. I live in sunny MA, where in the winter we average 15kWh generated to the summer we average 50kWh. My commute is 60 miles per day which is around 6-8kW depending in traffic and weather. Also, my local power is a mixture of nuclear and wind. So. Can we please stop rolling coal burning power plants into the electric car equation as if it is univer…

When you are looking at electric vehicles globally or even nationally you must take the power plants into the equations. Whilst you may get electricity from renewable sources, and that is good for you, when you look at the country as a whole, renewable sources make up a small percentage of the total electricity produced.

It's really only cities that have a generation problem, and it's mostly American cities that combine city living with car ownership.

The electric cars problems are mostly magnified by American urbanites. Boston is no exception. It might help if zip cars were predominantly EV, although my urbite friends have mostly replaced Zip with Uber

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#137
First of all, if you really want to improve the environment the best way to do so is to not buy any vehicle at all.

It's pretty clear to me that I will be unlikely to ever own a car again. But this Tesla is the one I expect will be my self-driving taxi for many years to come and before the decade is out.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#138
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

"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?

[deleted]

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#139
This pretty much boils down to "if overnight we replaced 100% of cars with electric it would cause these problems."

Let's take a more realistic scenario: That tomorrow all of the existing two car households have one electric car.

> 1. Your average town does not have the power infrastructure to deal with an extra draw of a whole bunch of commuters arriving home roughly around the same time (say, between 5:30 and 7 pm) and all of them plugging their cars in to recharge.

This has easy solutions, e.g. you tell the charging station what time you need the battery charged by and in 95% of cases it ends up doing the charging from 10PM to 6AM, which makes the power grid very happy.

> Rapid charging is actually not so rapid, highway re-charging stations will have to be much larger than current gas stations

But you will also need fewer of them because you can't currently buy gas at home but you can charge your car there. So you're really only talking about the gas stations on major highways, i.e. truck stops, which are already quite large because it's typical for people to stop and eat there already.

And in the one out of two cars scenario, for long trips you could take the gasoline powered car.

> Every highway would be more or less automatically accompanied by a bunch of power infrastructure

Most of the existing high voltage power infrastructure already follows the highways because both go to population centers and are installed in places which are cheap and efficient to claim with eminent domain.

And needing to build infrastructure is only a problem if we build electric cars faster than we can build power infrastructure, which we probably won't.

> Re-charging will not work nearly as well when vehicle utilization goes up due to sharing

Which is only a problem for the subset of vehicles used for sharing and there is no reason they can't be hybrids instead of pure electric.

Alternatively the people who purchase cars for this purpose could use cars with swappable batteries and leave one charging while the other is on the road and then swap them as needed.

> If a substantial chunk of our energy consumption due to transportation needs is going to shift from being directly petroleum based to being mostly based on the timely delivery of electrons in vast quantities and to a very large number of locations then we will have to invest massively in both generating capacity and grid capacity.

That isn't necessarily true. If most electric vehicles are charged at night then they'll be using the idle capacity of the existing grid rather than requiring new capacity to be built.

Of course some new capacity may be necessary, but that doesn't seem like any kind of insurmountable problem. We already know how to do that.

> Range

This is a problem exactly where it's a problem. Future electric cars may or may not solve it, but in the meantime you know what kind of driving you do. If you take long trips for business, buy a hybrid. If you have a two car household, buy one electric car and one hybrid and take the hybrid on long trips. There is no law that says 100% of cars have to be electric; they can work where they work.

> Trailers

Range when towing a trailer is generally not that important because even if a lot of people do it periodically, they don't do it very often. And this is again solved by having a family buy one EV and one hybrid and using the hybrid for what the EV is bad at.

> Service

This is clearly a problem exclusive to early adopters. If electric cars were half of all cars it wouldn't exist.

> Tax Breaks

I'm not sure how this one is even supposed to be a problem. All else equal, tax credits increase tax rates because the money has to come from somewhere. If everybody buys an EV then everybody gets the credit and the government raises the tax rate so that everybody ends up paying what they would have without it. If half of everybody buys an EV then the government raises the tax rate half that much and there is a significant tax advantage if you buy an EV, which was the whole idea. The credit can never bankrupt the government because the government also sets the base rate.

Re: The Problem with Electric Vehicles

#140

Several of the author's arguments center around what exists today in terms of infrastructure. Yes, if necessary grid/stations don't exist the average EV purchaser might have trouble getting recharged, kWh prices might go up, etc... Deep eye roll at stuff like this. I hope the author realizes that at some point there wasn't a network of gas stations across the country, there wasn't much of an electrical grid, or a hig…

> I hope the author realizes that at some point there wasn't a network of gas stations across the country, Not much of an argument. The ICE won out over electric drivetrains for the express reason that liquid fuels are far easier to provide logistics for than batteries. Most electric car makers stopped production at some point in the 1910s. It's not that electric vehicles were never tried out. They were. Gasoline was…

Yes it was. In 1910. Do you honestly expect that to always be true?
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