Grid and Electric Vehicles

I'm not a fan of watching videos for information. Care to give an overview of what I might find?

Talking about running a vacuum cleaner for 24 hours a day is not a particularly useful reference point. I don't know how much power a vacuum cleaner uses.

The 30% higher load number is also not very useful, because the important part of the added load is timing. The average auto is driven around 40 miles a day, which is around 10 kWh. I get my charge from a 120V, 15A outlet. That would be around 10 hours each night. That's a more relevant description for people who don't have EVs. People who do have EVs don't need to be educated.

The 30% extra load on the grid is apparently worked out from current gasoline sales so it presumably includes trucks. It has been coming up for years so it is probably reliable.

The US grid went up from 355 billion kiloWatt.hours in 1950 to 3801 in 2000, about 5% per year, so 30% is about six years of that kind of growth. It's going to take longer than that to move everybody over to electric vehicles, so it's not something to get excited about.

The narrator used a bit over 13,000 miles per year for his starting point. I've been seeing articles claiming something like 25% of the U.S. workforce will be work from home so that should help.

I think the work from home number is dropping. Companies didn't have much choice during the pandemic, but they are backing away from the telecommute thing now.

What are you trying to say? Why not just come out and say it?

It's always the ones who don't have an EV who don't understand them or how they charge.

I added this comment to the video:

You ignore the fact that the Woke crowd is hell-bent on shutting down ALL fossil-fueled power plants. Solar and wind can't replace this production because they are unreliable and require huge amounts of land. Also, it is not just that they want us to switch our cars to electric, they want ALL of our energy use to be electric: no gas furnaces, air conditioners, water heaters, stoves, ovens, etc. This WILL impact the peak usage of electricity.

The first calculation this guy does is wrong. He uses some silly figure (33.7 kWh/gallon of gas) to calculate the total amount of energy needed to power all passenger cars in a year. But that's the wrong calculation and the 33.7 kWh is the total energy in the gasoline, taking into account none of the efficiency issues of gas cars. Here's how you do the actual calculation.

230 million cars (his number)

• 13,500 miles/(car year) / 4 miles/kWh = 0.776 trillion kWh/ year, not 1.2 trillion

Everything I see in his video is similar, using a poor numerical basis and then making gross errors like saying drawing 1,800 W is the same as running a vacuum cleaner. That has got to be one monster vacuum!

How can I believe anything the guy says?

You can just use his numbers and divide by 4.5, since ICEs are around 20% to 30% efficient. So, we got around 300 billion KWhr/yr.

Ricky snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com Wrote in message:r

At 25% efficiency for ice, that 33.6kwh equates to 28mpg.

Cheers

Actually, vacuum cleaners are a pretty heavy load:

12 A that is 1440 W, not that far off of 1800 W. A 32 A L2 charger, however, draws 7.7 KW. He was looking at the average power to lower the amount. Unfortunately, the utility has to supply the 7.7 KW whenever the car is charging. Multiply that by 12-15 car owners doing the same thing. Here is just one example of the impact to a small town of 25,000, Palo Alto, CA If their cost to upgrade is $75M the cost per resident is THREE MILLION DOLLARS! Multiple that by THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY MILLION:

Impact to the Electric Utility The study shows that electricity demand for all-electric homes peaks on winter mornings due to heating, and averages around 3.62 kW per home, or 264% of a mixed-fuel home’s peak demand.[3] EV charging can add an additional 1.216 kW to the average peak demand of an allelectric home. Assuming each distribution transformer serves 8 houses, the load on each transformer under the all-electric SFRs scenario is calculated at 2.64 times the current transformer load plus 9.74 kW for EV charging. As shown in Table 1 below, the additional load will trigger the need to upgrade some of the distribution transformers, secondary distribution lines (which connect the distribution transformer to the homes served by the transformer), and feeder lines (which connects the substation to the distribution points).

Table 1: Estimate of overcapacity equipment in the electric distribution grid under the all-electric SFRs scenario Number of over-capacity distribution transformers 759 - 773 (95+%) Number of over-capacity secondary distribution lines 162 – 155 (20%) Number of over-capacity feeders 17 (25%)

The total cost to upgrade the distribution system grid is estimated to range between $30 million and $75 million. Around 40% of this cost is equipment cost, and 60% is labor cost. This covers the cost to upgrade 95% of the distribution transformers, 20% of the secondary distribution lines, and 25% of the feeder lines. The cost estimate does not include additional undergrounding of feeder lines or secondary distribution lines. If financed over 30 years at an interest rate of 3.2%, this would be approximately $1.6 million to $3.9 million per year. For comparison, the Electric Utility Capital Improvement Program (CIP) spending between FY 2021 and FY 2025 ranges between $11 million and $26 million per year.

[3] CPAU currently has a summer system peak of around 170 MW and a winter system peak of around 135 MW. The electrification of all SFRs will create an additional 8 -10% load to the summer system peak which occurs between 4pm to 6pm.

That's a number plucked from air. I guess you can always find a way to calculate an "average" that will give you all sorts of numbers. But, my model X, which is the EV equivalent of a Buick, gets 3 to 4 miles per kWh (0.25 to 0.33 kWh per mile).

LOL It's a hell of a lot better than 8 miles per gallon!

There's no shortage of bogus numbers to be calculated.

The efficiency of EVs is already very, very good. There is precious little wasted energy in EVs, so not a good place to look for improvement in efficiency.

God! That is an amazing number!!! 20% is nuclear, leaving zero for wind, solar, hydro, etc. Maybe we are running at greater than 100%?

According to section 2.9 it would cost between $1,981 and $4,972 per single family residence (SFR) to upgrade (not $3 million). Each SFR presumably houses on average more than one person.

"They"??? I'm talking about the numbers from my bucket of volts, which I check on a regular basis. The Tesla model 3 and Y (more conventional sizes of cars) get 4 mi/kWh regularly and up to 5 mi/kWh. My electron guzzler gets more like 2.5 to 3 mi/kWh.

You can be in denial as much as you like, but these are facts.

Much like sed.

On Friday, September 1, 2023 at 3:10:37 PM UTC-4, Martin Rid wrote:

What is your point?

I see I posted inconsistent numbers. I sometimes get them mixed up because of the reciprocal values some people use, mi/kWh vs. Wh/mi.

My model X generally gets 3 mi/kWh sometimes getting as low as 2.5 mi/kWh, and less often close to 4 mi/kWh (much less often). Mostly this depends on the roads traveled. 50-55 mph roads give the best mileage, although stop and go traffic actually gives the best. Weird, huh? Just goes to show how EVs are different from ICE.

On Friday, 1 September 2023 at 18:24:09 UTC-7, Ricky wrote: ...

...

Tesla cars (and all other EVs as far as I know) indicate battery energy usage on the internal display (and through any phone app) and do not include the inefficiency of the AC to DC conversion.

Also in the case of Tesla they do not include parasitic losses such as occur when stationary but not in gear or when parked.

My Tesla Model 3, for example, indicates a long term average of 235 Wh/mile on the internal display but my measurement of the AC power gives a figure closer to 330Wh/mile.

I used to get 4.7mi/kWh (AC energy) with my previous car, a Chevrolet SparkEV.

I charge using 240V where the AC to DC conversion is about 90-92% efficient. When using 120V the efficiency drops to about 80% which will increase the AC consumption further.

An overall average efficiency of 3 mi/kWh for AC energy consumption across all types of EVs is, I think, a reasonable value.

kw

Which is very low. Pretty much every part of the energy chain from the power plant to stepping on the accelerator is highly efficient in an EV.

I actually do monitor the energy at the EVSE or the fast charger and the loss is low.

Actually, this is factored in. When I drive the car for the first time each day it shows a slug of energy used that is not part of driving. Also, all the energy adds up. If I use 55 kWh driving, the battery has 55 kWh less energy than when I started.

Where do you measure this? I don't see this discrepancy.

I see some losses when charging from 120V, but others tell me they don't see this.

I don't agree. I generally get 3 mi/kWh in a model X which is a fuel burning pig. That's factoring in everything drawn from the wall.

Of course he did. It's not just the Woke crowd, but everybody who understands that anthropgemic global warming is seriously damaging our environment who wants to see all fossil-fueled power plants shot down.

They aren't unreliable, merely intermittent, and while 1% of the planet's land area is a huge amount of land it's not a problem to find enough of it, particularly when you can grow crops and graze animals between the solar panels. Wind turbines are even less of a problem. Sewage Sweeper doesn't really seem to believe in grid storage. There isn't enough of it yet, but is is geting bought and installed.,

Air conditioners are electric anyway. Running air-conditioner backwards (reverse cycle air-conditioning, which is what I've got) replaces gas furnaces. Using a heat pump to warm your hot water is less popular (though it would save you money). Around here stoves are mostly electric, and induction hobs are replacing gas rings on cook-tops.

None of it will make as much difference as moving over to electric vehicles, and getting more grid generating capacity has never been a problem in the past - in the US it went up but 5% per year every year from 1950 to 2000 without anybody making any fuss about it.

Not really. Stop and go traffic is at the slowest speeds, hence the lowest parasitic drag. And braking is regenerative, so little losses there. This is one advantage of EVs and hybrids.