Featured Article about EV's from Oilprice.com

that's why elon got into solar

 

It is sort of a dumb question. If we have enough energy to burn gas in cars then we could just burn the gas and produce electricity to power cars. This would actually be dumb to do but would be more efficient. This is because a power plant can run at or near its peak efficiency most of the time. While the gas engine in most cars does not run at peak efficiency all the time. Hybrid's like a Prius maybe get close, but they still have to warm up and get the catalytic converter hot (energy waste).

Mike

 

+1

Here in Texas I was able to choose a “free nights” program that is aimed at encouraging EV charging and other high use loads at night. It includes purchasing green offsets too. With a couple of simple timers and changes in home routines (laundry mainly), we’ve been able to achieve a 70/30 night/day usage pattern that really pays off for us and the utilities.

 

My utility offered a time of day use billing that billed on the basis of seasonal peak use times of their facilities. We had a unit attached to all our high use appliances and HVAC units that would limit their use to the times we specified. Saved 10-20% of the bill. All it meant is we did dishes and wash at different times and turned down the heat a bit in winter and up in summer. Called Smart Energy Solutions.

 

Well yes - math doesn't work out economically for this equation. It is more efficient to burn oil than gas but these generators are about 33% efficient, so less efficient than a hybrid. The fleet isn't hybrid and we expect bev prices to fall bellow hybrid prices, but ... its not very much of a gain. natural gas ccgt which we are building and utilizing more today are about 50% efficient. The new ones 60% and can cycle well with load between 40%-100%, and turn on and off quickly. The plants are a lot more expensive than petroleum burning generating plants but the fuel is less expensive and these plants should last decades. This makes the electricity they produce less expensive. A rav4 prime gets 94 mpge on electricity, multiplying out (33% oil to electricity x 93% grid efficiency x 94mpge) we get 30 mpg versus 38 mpg for the same vehicle in hybrid mode.

We do have countries like Japan and Germany that have recently built new coal plants. Japan does not have cheap natural gas and Germany doesn't want to be dependent on natural gas coming from Russia. In these countries it is more of the plan to build more renewables. They have decided to pay today for more renewable infrastructure to reduce ghg a great deal more. I can see the oil generators + renewables + coal and bevs for India. They have poor electrical reliability and this may help all around.

 

My very rough math was meant to debunk the basis for this entire thread -- the idea that we don't have enough energy to power EVs.
When, in fact, we clearly do.

As for all the discussions on time-of-day pricing or peak trimming by utilities during high demand...
These are all nice. And they tend to address the economics of it.
For example, using electrical transmission capacity at night to charge EVs is a good thing but has almost nothing to do with having enough energy.

Its like the difference between the storage capacity of a hard disk vs the bus bandwidth.

Mike

 

Yes of course we do I didn't understand your point.

Latest numbers I could find were 2019 where vehicles in the US traveled 3.228 trillion miles and used 142 billion gallons of gasoline. If grid efficiency is 93% and average vehicle got 90 mpge then it would require 1.3 trillion kwh instead to power all of those vehicles. The grid last year supplied 4.1 trillion kwh, so it would need 32% more energy. That would be bad if it happened tomorrow, but something quite easy to build over a decade. I expect much more than a decade to make the transition, so quite doable.

Most fossil powerplants do not run close to capacity at night. In 2019 the US grid was around 39% natural gas, 23% coal, 7% hydro, 11% other renewable, 20% nuclear. The 28% hydro and nuclear isn't going to grow, so the rest needs to grow 45%. I would think other renewable (mainly wind, solar, geothermal, biomass) can easily double or more . Germany now produces 43% of electricity from renewables. Doubling other and adding hydro would bring the US to 29%, so room to grow. I hope coal doesn't grow back but that would be less than we were burning a decade ago, and we have the plants built. Natural gas can easily fill the void until more renewables are built, and more of the 60% efficient ccgt plants would and shutting down the old natural gas thermal plants would make it so not that much natural gas needs to be consumed (the new plants are 50% more efficient).