I heard that California's electric grid could not handle charging them all at once. They had to say don't charge your EV. It takes a lot of lithium to make batteries for the EVs. Which ruins the environment. Might as well drive a gas powered car until they can fix the problems with EVs.
Was that intended as irony? Those are exactly the kind of arguments the article is debunking - so I think we'd at least need to see references...
Clearly the grid in Cali couldn't handle charging all the EVs if every ICE vehicle on the road today was magically replaced with an EV, but that will take decades to happen, during which the grid will be built up.
You(we) are already paying right now by delaying, deferring and not acting. We are all paying in terms of environmental climate and all the consequences of that, to the environment, human health and yes, the economy too.
You have too much faith in PG&E and SDGE. They have, through politics, gained long term contracts, increased prices, plenty of profit yet maintenance is still poor and flex alerts are frequent. And are squeezing the benefit of solar to customers that bear to cost to benefit themselves.
PG&E is a monopoly that went through multiple bankruptcies. I'm grateful that they are not completely dead and there is still power, but this is about as far from a free-market goldmine as it gets.
> You've probably heard it all, too: A Prius is worse for the planet than a Hummer. EVs are coal-powered cars. Electric cars produce more CO2 than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Lithium mining is uniquely bad for the environment. Cobalt mining relies largely on slave labor, if not child slave labor. Actually, that last part is sadly true. But the rest? Lies.
Later:
> Sure, more EVs will mean more batteries, but unlike gasoline, which always has to be burned, battery production can become (and is becoming) greener. Another way to look at it is the energy required to produce an average EV's battery is equivalent to about 74 gallons of gas.
Throwing a load on a system at max is a bad thing. Switzerland is trying to make preparations: https://www.electrive.com/2022/12/02/switzerland-rumoured-to.... There’s only so much power out there right now and it’s often “elsewhere” than the major population centres (or mountain fastnesses).
It’s way overblown as air conditioning was a larger issue for the electric grid than EV’s will be. Average demand for an 15k mile per year EV is only 430 watts, and people don’t all fast charge them at the same instant. Generally people charge when costs are low because demand is low to save money.
Meanwhile everyone’s AC is going full blast at noon on a hot summer day meanwhile EV’s generally charge when rates are cheap.
There’s a units problem, as googling this finds : Generally, electric cars charged at home use about 7,200 watts (W) of electricity, which can vary depending on the mode and home charger. Most electric car chargers use between 32 and 40 amps, and connect to a 240 volt outlet in your home's breaker box.
That’s peak not average, 7,200 W is only while actually charging. EV only need about one and a half hours at that rate per day and can be scheduled for low demand periods.
7,200 W * 1.5 hour/day = 7.2 kW * 1.5h * 4 miles per kW hour * 365 days ~= 15,768 miles per year.
I'm not sure if you're trying to tell a joke or not. The amount of effort you took to explain the post says you aren't joking, but choosing the average as the number you base your case on says you are.
That confusion you feel stems from a misunderstanding about the electrical grid.
Hundreds of millions of people aren’t all living in lockstep and many of them are trying to save money using demand pricing. A family might go on a long trip and use fast charging, but every family in the country isn’t going to be going on a trip that same weekend and try to charge at the same second.
right, but everyone within a region commutes at roughly the same time, had roughly the same weekend schedule, etc. etc.
There was that story a couple years ago about England's electrical grid and specific localities being stressed because apparently all of England would turn on their teapots at the same time after a TV show ended.
EV’s aren’t microwaves, you can plug in to the grid at 7PM and not start charging until 2AM. So yes, demand isn’t absolutely constant but it turns out it’s even better than constant as demand for EV charging decreases when other sources peak.
Some people charge at home, others at the office, and some exclusively at fast chargers.
I think the important thing is lost. Average is useless for determining if a grid (and it is not THE grid, since localities have bottlenecks) can support a load in time. Maybe it can, but the on statistic given as evidence is an average, which doesn't help explain anything one way OR the other.
Also, I'm not sure I can get behind the logic about peak times either way until we discuss how rolling blackouts would affect this.
It probably sounds like I have a side in this, but I do not. I do not currently own an EV, but that is due to up front costs (I do not even buy ICE cars new, the prices are insane for an asset that only depreciates). My daily commute makes me want to own one, actually. However, I do have an interest in making sure we are not saying flamboyant things like "electric cars cause less indirect pollution" without making even an attempt to quantify it, or saying unhelpful things about how the average load of an EV relates to whether a grid can support a lot of them.
The system is very rarely at max. So rare it made headlines. They asked people to conserve power anyway they could for a few hours. The other 8755 hours in the year you can do whatever you'd like.
I charged just fine to my normal 90% battery every day of that heat wave. Turns out that it's cheaper to charge overnight, so why would I charge during the peak anyway?
