Featured Another Fuel Cell Article

I'm not quite sure of your question. Do you mean the extra generation capacity needed for plug-in vehicles? If regulation is good, then the owners of the vehicles contribute, making grid improvements less expensive for existing rate payers. If regulation is bad, well whoever the regulators favor.

Let's take the case about samoa, that hill brought up. Elon Musk's SolarCity reveals American Samoa solar project, as merger with Tesla approved

This of course has nothing to do with cars. The switch to battery backed up solar is saving 109,500 gallons of diesel a year. Who pays for it? I'm not entirely sure how to answer that. American taxpayers, samoan tax payers, and samoan rate payers are now paying less than for the old less reliable diesel system (which I believe is still there in case it is needed for back up). Lower costs were partially subsidized by solar city and tesla shareholders at the time, as neither company made money. Now solar city is part of tesla, so I guess tesla stock and bond holders also contributed to giving american nationals lower cost more reliable power. Relatively, yes, it takes materials and labor to build the panels, the battery back up and to install and maintain them. This provides a relatively short payback compared to running on diesel generators.

On the question of say plug-in cars in texas the utilities and regulators are excited to have more on the grid. Texas already has a smart grid, but needs more power generation and infractructure to replace older less efficient steam powered natural gas and coal plants with new combined cycle and open cycle natural gas plants, wind, and solar. In texas more plug-in demand that can be removed during peaks in return for lower rates, will help make rates relatively lower for everyone. In california, where regulation is still very screwed up, but not as much as the past, the situation is not clear. It is likely plug-ins get subsidized from the cap and trade plan for ghg. Here costs shift to other users of electricity and oil products. The cap and trade plan also seems to be not building generation capacity efficiently in state further increasing rates. The impact of electric vehicles per vehicle is fairly low, it is the program itself that increases rates. The impact of fuel cell vehicle per vehicle is much higher, but because there are so few fuel cell vehicles in california, it should simply be thought of as a cost to car registrations and electricity and petroleum product users of $20+M/year.

 

i'm a little slow this AM.
$20m+/yr ? Not sure what that number is meant to be attributable to ..... iow, is that a guesstimation of the non renewable fuel amount needed, to reform, + compress/maintenance of hydrogen gas? .... per existing car (eg; over their ~10ye life expectancy) vs the little fleet of them running around the landscape per year? etc, or what.
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The traditional cars and transportation cause pollution from manufacture, use, and scrapping. Just like the alternatives, but more of it.