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The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

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Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#581

Post by r14c »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #239
r14c wrote: post #47

The only EV I'm even interested in is an Aptera. They're building a new class of vehicle that takes advantage of the affordances of full electric. I want a small efficient car that can go long distances and nobody else is building anything like that. Even US capital markets don't understand the appeal of this class of vehicle, but luckily they were able to fill their funding in global capital markets. I'm pretty pess…

It's neat, but it would require segregated roadways to be safe, and we're not going to get that. I'd love to live in that world though. Smaller, lighter, lower-speed vehicles. Bicycles. Walkable neighborhoods. It'd be great. But we can't have those nice things, because most Americans have atrocious taste -- and the ones who do have good taste, you can't afford to live next to.

Not really, its registered as a motorcycle. From what I understand they're going above and beyond on safety to meet standards normally set for cars, but there are other light vehicles that people drive all the time that don't get special lanes.

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#582

Post by secabeen »

epistasis wrote: post #421
jerkstate wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit) I think this is a common reason for disappointment in solar incentives. At least half of your power bill pays for transmission, and the half that pays for generation needs to be constructed such that the overall supply must meet the demand at all times, rather than simply supplying a number of kWh…

I'm not fully sold on this reasoning. Electricity on the local distribution node has a value equal to the cost of generation plus the distribution. That's the value of it, what we pay. So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided. But the value is still the same. Now, the T&D infrastructure has already been built, and the utility wants to get paid no matter what, but if they were a p…

Eliminating the delivery of kWs doesn't change the grid costs one whit. Grid costs are driven mostly by the number of customers, the max demand that the grid has to support at one time, maintenance, and the distance the lines have to travel to reach you. Just like a water main or sewage pipe, reductions in demand only change the cost of distribution when they are large enough and prolonged enough to allow for smaller equipment and fewer lines.

Having a residential power connection from the grid allows you to demand up to 200Amps of power, at any time of day or night, 365 days a year, with zero notice. The power company has to build the lines to support that potential demand, whether you use it or not. Over all of California, distributed solar probably has reduced the expenditures we would have need to have made on new transmission and generation facilities compared to a world without distributed solar, but that doesn't affect the baseline cost of a ubiquitous grid that serves from Crescent City to the border with Arizona at Yuma, and all points between.

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#583

Post by Dylan16807 »

epistasis wrote: post #421
jerkstate wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit) I think this is a common reason for disappointment in solar incentives. At least half of your power bill pays for transmission, and the half that pays for generation needs to be constructed such that the overall supply must meet the demand at all times, rather than simply supplying a number of kWh…

I'm not fully sold on this reasoning. Electricity on the local distribution node has a value equal to the cost of generation plus the distribution. That's the value of it, what we pay. So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided. But the value is still the same. Now, the T&D infrastructure has already been built, and the utility wants to get paid no matter what, but if they were a p…

> So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided.

No they haven't. The grid cost is to build and maintain the wires and equipment. Your solar output isn't reliable enough for them to downsize the grid, so even though selling to a neighbor bypasses the grid it doesn't reduce the cost of having a grid.

What you could do is split out the grid cost, make it be a fixed fee per location instead of per-kWh. That would drop the price of buying a kWh until it's much closer to the price of selling.

But if you do that, someone with a lot of solar panels would end up with even less money in their pocket, since their reduced kWh purchases used to let them skimp on grid fees, and now that no longer happens.

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#584

Post by r14c »

kube-system wrote: post #123
r14c wrote: post #47

The only EV I'm even interested in is an Aptera. They're building a new class of vehicle that takes advantage of the affordances of full electric. I want a small efficient car that can go long distances and nobody else is building anything like that. Even US capital markets don't understand the appeal of this class of vehicle, but luckily they were able to fill their funding in global capital markets. I'm pretty pess…

Aptera is coming up on their 20th anniversary of being vaporware. It's a vehicle with a potential market of potentially hundreds of nerds. Unfortunately, an idea that appeals to so few will never be a viable mass-production automaker.

I was happy to see them get funded, but its fair to be wary. They are a new company after all, but I think there are a lot of emerging markets where this type of vehicle makes more sense than a wagon. I'm pretty pessimistic about US manufacturing in general tho so I'm willing to admit that there's a good chance that you're right about Aptera.

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#585

Post by secabeen »

epistasis wrote: post #539
jerkstate wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your excess solar power is not worth the retail power cost because it is not as reliable or plentiful as utility power. If you think your neighbor would pay you the same rate for your unreliable excess power as they pay the utility, you should start a power company! The infrastructure has not “already been built” - it is constantly under expansion and maintenance, and the bonds used to fund construction also need to…

My frame of mind is that residential solar has the potential to dramatically reduce transmission and grid costs, but there is no way to force the utilities to shift to that model, because they will make less money. And regulators are asleep at the wheel and beholden to the utilities they regulate. Grids are sized for peak, and without solar that peak is midday in most places, meaning that distributed behind-the-meter…

Peak load without solar is not midday. Here's an NYT article from 1975 about introduction of Time of Use billing describing peak rates being in the morning and evening:

> Mrs. Wells changed her housework habits because for part of the year it costs her more than six times as much to use electricity from 8 A.M. to 11 A.M. and 5 P.M. to 9 P.M. as it costs during the rest of the day.

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/29/archives/experimenting-wi...

Current CAISO data shows that overall demand still peaks in the late afternoon to early evening. I picked a day in mid-august, and demand at 7pm is 40% higher (39GW) than at solar noon of 1pm (29GW).

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#586

Post by jerkstate »

epistasis wrote: post #539
jerkstate wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your excess solar power is not worth the retail power cost because it is not as reliable or plentiful as utility power. If you think your neighbor would pay you the same rate for your unreliable excess power as they pay the utility, you should start a power company! The infrastructure has not “already been built” - it is constantly under expansion and maintenance, and the bonds used to fund construction also need to…

My frame of mind is that residential solar has the potential to dramatically reduce transmission and grid costs, but there is no way to force the utilities to shift to that model, because they will make less money. And regulators are asleep at the wheel and beholden to the utilities they regulate. Grids are sized for peak, and without solar that peak is midday in most places, meaning that distributed behind-the-meter…

I think you've still got too much of an "us vs them" mentality about the utilities, its not so much that they are refusing to shift to that model per se, these shifts are ongoing and happening today (which is why you're getting paid 10c per kwh for unreliable solar, IMO definitely more than it's worth), but I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations with how far things can be shifted without addressing the implicit assumptions, such as the reliability of the power. Like, if we downsize the transformer between your subdivision and the grid by too much, that subdivision will have brownouts on cloudy days. In order to avoid that, we could deploy industrial scale battery packs, which also costs a ton of money and requires ongoing maintenance; at that point, it's probably cheaper to just use a bigger transformer to connect to the greater grid, where we have nuclear, hydro, wind, commercial solar, and hydrocarbon generation, which can all be used in different situations to match the grid demand with supply on a larger economy of scale.

In conclusion, the retail price of your electricity includes the engineering and infrastructure required to make your power delivery reliable most of the time, which is much more valuable than the raw kilowatts coming off of your solar panels.

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#587

Post by ThatPlayer »

epistasis wrote: post #539
jerkstate wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your excess solar power is not worth the retail power cost because it is not as reliable or plentiful as utility power. If you think your neighbor would pay you the same rate for your unreliable excess power as they pay the utility, you should start a power company! The infrastructure has not “already been built” - it is constantly under expansion and maintenance, and the bonds used to fund construction also need to…

My frame of mind is that residential solar has the potential to dramatically reduce transmission and grid costs, but there is no way to force the utilities to shift to that model, because they will make less money. And regulators are asleep at the wheel and beholden to the utilities they regulate. Grids are sized for peak, and without solar that peak is midday in most places, meaning that distributed behind-the-meter…

Peak is not usually midday; peak is in in the evening when people get home from work. So in places like California and Hawaii, you get the opposite problem where the solar drops off right before peak demand and you have to ramp up other generators to make up for it. It's called the duck curve problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

The United States electric grid data is freely available and pretty neat: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Choose a grid or a state to get regional time and you can see that region's peak will usually be 4-7pm. You can even see that weekend peaks are a bit lower, and that there's a second peak at ~10am when people get to work.

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#588

Post by _jules »

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #390
glial wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I exclusively buy Toyotas because they are cheaper to maintain than American cars. Is your argument that I shouldn't have access to Japanese cars either? I understand the desire to have a strategic reserve of manufacturing capacity. However, the US also subsidizes the US auto industry heavily by e.g. bailing out GM and Chrysler. It frustrates me that US car manufacturers continue to make exclusively heavy, low-effici…

There have been people who wanted much more protectionism from Japanese autos since the 1970s, esp. since they demonstrated they make great cars for less money and detroit wasn't really interested in trying too hard. History looked like it was going to repeat with EVs from the US except for Tesla. Now GM has some decent cars across a variety of models, Ford has 2. But neither company has put out any really low priced…

While not an EV, but a hybrid - I'm the lucky owner of an affordable Ford Maverick little truck. From what I can tell, Ford makes a lot of sweet $$$ selling the F series trucks and does not really care about low margins.

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#589

Post by eddd-ddde »

bluGill wrote: post #447
bane wrote: post #434

I can't believe that the average price of a car in the U.S. is almost $50k. For rapidly depreciating assets. Here I am working out TCO costs for a range of mid-sized cars for my next purchase, and trying to decide if the extra $2k for a Prius Prime over a Prius will beat the differential in fuel costs for my driving situation. I feel like a chump, but I know it's the smarter thing to do with my money. I coworker of m…

Some Americans. The average car in the US is 12 years old. I just checked my local craigslist, most cars of that age are under 10k, and almost none are more than 20k. Since that is average we can assume cars of that age will run (with maintenance) for another decade and so shouldn't be very expensive. Of course at that age almost nothing is electric.

The average car in the US? Or the average daily driver car?

Cars just don't disappear, so all vehicles would "polute" the statistics right?

Re: The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

#590

Post by ricardobeat »

somerandomqaguy wrote: post #529
ricardobeat wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current average monthly salary in China is $3000-$4000 US dollars. This is not about cheap labour anymore but simple economies of scale. The whole talk about subsidies is pure smoke screen. US automakers have received a lot more subsidies than their Chinese counterparts. The top chinese firm receiving government subsidies, CATL, got ~$500M USD last year. BYD is said to have received $3.5 billion in total in its l…

??? The average BYD line autoworker earns $640 to $840 USD a month, but that require overtime; 1.5x pay on weekdays and 2x pay on weekends. BYD Wuxi workers went on strike in 2021 because BYD was trying to restructure to eliminate overtime, which would effectively drop the workers wage to under $400 USD a month.

Which is about the same a factory worker in Mexico, building the Ford Mach-E, makes. I imagine the purchasing power in China will be a lot higher.

China currently has multiple times higher costs than countries like Vietnam. Cheap labour is not a major factor anymore.

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