> It also needs zero fancy charging infrastructure. Have a regular US household power outlet anywhere in your garage or home exterior? Then you have everything you need to charge it up every night.
There will be significant additional load on the Electric grid. This will require the electric grid to be overhauled around the country. Couple this with "smart grid" mandates & you have yet another channel for government control via bureaucracy & regulation. Denizens of cities tend to be more numb to government control & people in more sparsely populated areas tend to be more willing to demand/defend freedom & liberty.
There are many new properties that need to add utility poles. Don't forget power loss over distance.
The big advantage of Gas is you can transport/store the product without the product losing energy.
> We could easily eliminate 50+% of US personal vehicle emissions, simply by putting 2013-era PHEV technology into every single car /SUV / truck, and getting people to plug them into regular 120V US household outlets overnight. Even rural folks would benefit greatly from getting 1 or 2 free "electricity gallons" every night.
Living in Tennessee, it's difficult to ignore the power lines everywhere in otherwise abundant greenery. Electric cars will only add more power lines & infrastructure.
> There will be significant additional load on the Electric grid. This will require the electric grid to be overhauled around the country.
Two electric cars in a household, both charging simultaneously, uses less electricity combined than just one standard clothes dryer or one central air conditioner -- the kind of appliances everyone already has in their home and runs regularly.
It's not nothing of course. And some parts of the grid will need capacity improvements. But we're only talking about 900 to 1400 watts per car here, and most of that only happening at night when there's lots of spare capacity already. I don't see any factual reasons this would crush the power grid -- cars simply don't use enough electricity to cause a major problem.
> For full electric with higher mileage 5000-10,000 kilowatts would be a lot more likely.
I don't think so. Sure, it's technically possible to use that much power, but most people aren't going to empty their Tesla battery every single day, for the same reason most people don't buy a whole tank of gasoline every single day.
You can charge a Tesla on a 1.4kw US household outlet, just like every other car. It will still give you 50+ miles a night. Bump that to just a 3.3kW charger and you'll be pulling over 100 miles of charge nightly. 3.3kW is more than enough to cover 92% of all commuters nationwide, according to USDOT.
Superchargers are awesome and all, and are great for roadtrips, but 99% of people will have no need to pull 17kW down in their home. That's an insane amount of power.
Speaking as someone who's worked in renewables and utilities, I can tell you that the exact opposite is true. Having a reliable load at night would flatten out the demand curve for electricity, making the grid significantly easier and cheaper to manage.
Those utility poles and power lines you worry about are there to handle peak load, which won't be impacted at all by EVs, which will charge predominantly at night.
A solid mix of renewables -- hydro or geo for base load, with solar for peak load and wind to top off intermittent and nighttime demand -- is most efficient when the demand is relatively stable. No more need to shunt perfectly good electricity into the ground just because it's night.
And boy oh boy does it make the grid economics of distributed solar better. If most of your home's solar production capacity is being soaked up by your car, the grid and utility doesn't need to support big buy/sell cycles on sunny days. Electric cars would stabilize pricing and are probably the only way SmartGrid can realistically work.
Unlike refrigerator compressors or clothes dryers, electric cars have a smooth rate of draw and, as small industries pop up to parasitize the big battery in your EV, we'll increasingly see EVs as a home's store of electricity. This will be good for the system in the same way that per-home cisterns dramatically reduce demand on the water systems here in Southern Europe.
The grid can manage electric cars. They can actually make the grid more stable since it's not difficult to ask the cars to slow their charging at certain times. You don't even have to build this into the grid layer: just take these network connected vehicles and tell them to stop charging for 5 minutes out of the hour.
You can even go so far as to have the cars soak up the capacity. If you have a 2kW capacity circuit in the house, you can have the car drop it's draw as the fridge compressor clicks in.
while i think you're incorrect on many points, i'll address one for example:
>The big advantage of Gas is you can transport the product without the product losing energy.
the cost of transportation and infrastructure like for example gas loading terminals and gas stations is higher for gas than electricity. That is the "loss of energy".
Indeed, even when using fossil fuel as the energy source for both a gas-powered and an electric car, the well to wheel efficiency is 14-33% vs 42%, respectivly.
> There will be significant additional load on the Electric grid.
True, but people will be charging their cars most often when they're asleep, so it's less of an impact on peak load. It may be more of a base load/duty cycle impact.
However, even then, this type of load is also easily interruptible and automatically controlled by modern hardware. This makes it more serviceable with renewable power, more easy to make price-sensitive, and more able to provide demand response. (Potentially to the extent of being able to put power back into the grid and act as a negative load.)
(That said, the original idea of a household outlet is a stretch... I understand charging a Tesla at 120V/15A to be glacially slow.)
> The big advantage of Gas is you can transport/store the product without the product losing energy.
So gas tankers and carriers run on unicorn farts now? ;)
> Living in Tennessee, it's difficult to ignore the power lines everywhere in otherwise abundant greenery. Electric cars will only add more power lines & infrastructure.
Continue at the current rate of emissions and pollution, and the only greenery left in Tennessee or anywhere else will be brownish algae.
There will be significant additional load on the Electric grid. This will require the electric grid to be overhauled around the country. Couple this with "smart grid" mandates & you have yet another channel for government control via bureaucracy & regulation. Denizens of cities tend to be more numb to government control & people in more sparsely populated areas tend to be more willing to demand/defend freedom & liberty.
There are many new properties that need to add utility poles. Don't forget power loss over distance.
The big advantage of Gas is you can transport/store the product without the product losing energy.
> We could easily eliminate 50+% of US personal vehicle emissions, simply by putting 2013-era PHEV technology into every single car /SUV / truck, and getting people to plug them into regular 120V US household outlets overnight. Even rural folks would benefit greatly from getting 1 or 2 free "electricity gallons" every night.
Living in Tennessee, it's difficult to ignore the power lines everywhere in otherwise abundant greenery. Electric cars will only add more power lines & infrastructure.