Concerns over having enough power to supply EV demand?

[Milton Jeff]

I know several people have been skeptical regarding the ability of the US grid to keep up with demand but it is changing faster and faster. Wind and especially solar capacity is increasing rapidly. These are worldwide numbers so perhaps the US is not changing as rapidly though.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/world/wind-solar-renewables-record-climate-intl/index.html

Not sure how Canada is doing in comparison to the worldwide numbers but I suspect we are ahead of the curve.

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[fossil]

Utilities are going renewables as a supplement to fossil in large part because it's cheaper though it's seldom shown in rates.
When it's economical to store power it will take off.

 

[JASmith]

Wind is a good solution for coastal cities, but not inland as its too inconsistent and inefficient. While heavily subsidized, those massive windmills do come at quite a price once that government gravy train ends.

Solar is a good supplement, but again is inconsistent. Beyond the time of day issues and no cheap way to store the energy, the further North you go the less it makes sense. Inconsistent power sources also create the problem of displacing reliable and scalable power. For example, lets say there is a big grant to build a massive solar farm and the subsidies means it can produce power during the day in the summertime at only 4c/kwh cost. Well, if I have a plan for a scalable reliable natural gas plant that can increase or decrease output on demand to an extent, but it costs me 6c/kwh to make and I can only run it for peak morning and evening demand because of competition, the ROI is likely not there and it won't be built.

This is why hugely energy rich states like Texas are suddenly always being warned about power shortages, as we invested too heavily into solar and wind (now the number 1 wind power state in the nation) out of greed for all that subsidy, and now its hurting.

So in short, we don't have an inability to access cheap power, but we do have a problem with ensuring we have reliable on-demand power.

That said, I agree with Toyota in that jumping to EVs is premature anyway. Too many people live in apartments or park in the street and charging daily is just not practical. We should stick to an organic HEV to PHEV to EV, with EVs being 10 years down the line and without tax dollars coming from the middle class to fuel the purchases of the upper class.

 

[Radman73]

We really need to reinvest in nuclear power. Cheap, clean, and safe when designed, operated, and maintained. And before anyone brings up Chernobyl, please understand that the tragedy there was due to the design and operation of that plant which the purpose wasn't for power generation.

Solar takes up a ton of space and as mentioned production drops off dramatically the further north you go. We have 20kw of solar on our roof. We love it, but on a commercial scale the amount of land it takes is absurd.

Wind has its own issues. It can decimate local bird populations and is highly restricted based on local sustained winds.

With both solar and wind you can't count on consistent power generation.

Still a lot of room for innovation though.

 

[fossil]

looks like some inland states are bought in

Rank State Installed Wind Capacity in megawatts
1 Texas 37,422.0
2 Iowa 12,427.7
3 Oklahoma 11,991.9
4 Kansas 8,244.7
5 Illinois 7,037.2
6 California 6,117.3
7 Colorado 5,197.9
8 Minnesota 4,577.8
9 North Dakota 4,301.8
10 New Mexico 4,235.3
11 Oregon 4,043.3
12 Indiana 3,468.1
13 Washington 3,395.7
14 Michigan 3,231.0
15 Nebraska 3,219.6
16 South Dakota 3,219.2
17 Wyoming 3,176.3
18 Missouri 2,345.3

they fall off rapidly after #18

 

[SLINGSHOT]

Wind is a good solution for coastal cities, but not inland as its too inconsistent and inefficient. While heavily subsidized, those massive windmills do come at quite a price once that government gravy train ends.

Iowa is number two in wind power. Check your atlas . . . we are about as INLAND as you can get! Number ONE in per capita wind power.
Texas has power problems because of their arcane system of having hundreds of small suppliers. The Gov is programmed to HATE wind and solar. He LOVES oil and coal. He will be dust before it matters anyway, so what does he care?

 

[son of a ..sven]

Good site for some information on the topic.....

https://www.iea.org/

 

[TyPope]

It is most common for power plants to run at the lowest load requirement for their time period of operation (they can throttle up some but are slow to do so and thus rely on peaker plants to pick up the immediate demand shift). If the nighttime load is 60 GW for a 100MW powerplant, that's how hard it will run. It can't run faster than 60 MW because it can't just make that electricity disappear. So, it'll run at 60 GW. During the day, let's say, you need 85 GW, well, you can't just spin up the big one very fast, so they use peaker plants to make up the 25 GW difference (There's one just down the street from my neighborhood).

If you add a bunch of EVs charging at night, say they charge 20 GW at night, you'll increase the nightly output requirement of the plant while not affecting the daytime output. At this point, the big plant can be made to produce more power 24/7 at a constant 80 GW to cover the nighttime load which is still the lower power requirement period. In addition, during the day, it'll also run at a 80 GW rate and we now only need to use 5 GW from a peaker plant. So, we use more of the efficient plant's power and less of the peaker plant. In this way, adding electrical load at night helps lower the amount of time that the less efficient peaker plant needs to operate at high levels.

Now, my numbers are just notional to give the general gist of it.

This doesn't solve the problem for apartment dwellers or home-owners who don't have access to charging or dedicated parking.

 

[JASmith]

Iowa is number two in wind power. Check your atlas . . . we are about as INLAND as you can get! Number ONE in per capita wind power.

And its hugely inefficient and inconsistent. You need to learn more about wind power. Efficiency increases exponentially offshore and with increased size. If its so inefficient, why are they even building them so far inland? Subsidies! My company is getting rich off this administration's green grants, which is why we have all of these carbon zero signs all over the place, lol! Its big money, and efficiency doesn't matter when the government is involved.

Texas has power problems because of their arcane system of having hundreds of small suppliers.

Think logically for a moment, if that was the problem, why has Texas had the cheapest most abundant power for decades, and only recently has issues that just so happen to coincide with the massive boom in solar and wind power that has displaced reliable power plants which have shut down in great numbers in response? Doesn't make sense, right? Texas is barely behind California (that had a massive head start) in solar production (14.8 vs 15.9 megawatt), and is the number 1 state for growth of solar. Likewise, if strict government control of the grid is the solution, then why has California so often suffered from rolling brownouts and power problems?

The logical, and correct, answer is that Texas has the same problems as California now because we have the same overreliance on unreliable power sources (wind and solar) that vary greatly week to week, season to season, and time of day.

 

[fossil]

yep, wind power is as cheap and reliable as the Texas grid. they went cheap and did'nt winterize their wind power much the same as their fossil. we all know how that turned out.

 

[TyPope]

And its hugely inefficient and inconsistent. You need to learn more about wind power. Efficiency increases exponentially offshore and with increased size. If its so inefficient, why are they even building them so far inland? Subsidies! My company is getting rich off this administration's green grants, which is why we have all of these carbon zero signs all over the place, lol! Its big money, and efficiency doesn't matter when the government is involved.

Think logically for a moment, if that was the problem, why has Texas had the cheapest most abundant power for decades, and only recently has issues that just so happen to coincide with the massive boom in solar and wind power that has displaced reliable power plants which have shut down in great numbers in response? Doesn't make sense, right? Texas is barely behind California (that had a massive head start) in solar production (14.8 vs 15.9 megawatt), and is the number 1 state for growth of solar. Likewise, if strict government control of the grid is the solution, then why has California so often suffered from rolling brownouts and power problems?

The logical, and correct, answer is that Texas has the same problems as California now because we have the same overreliance on unreliable power sources (wind and solar) that vary greatly week to week, season to season, and time of day.

Didn't Texas lose roughly 46% of their power production capabilities when natural gas plants went offline because the "gas froze in the pipeline"?

"In the updated analysis included in a Wednesday ERCOT meeting, the grid operator calculated that natural gas power losses were several times that of wind generation lost during the power crisis — for example, at 8 a.m. on Feb. 16, about 4,000 megawatts of wind were lost due to the storm, compared to 25,000 megawatts of natural gas, according to data provided by ERCOT."

Storing renewable energy is still a problem, of course. And, that storm was an unexpected hot mess. Well, a cold mess. Cold, cold, mess.

 

[JASmith]

Didn't Texas lose roughly 46% of their power production capabilities when natural gas plants went offline because the "gas froze in the pipeline"?

Texas nuclear plant also froze, none of it was winterized sufficiently because it was a freak event for being this far South.

I don't think you are understanding the concept of reliable/scalable power.

This is a term in the industry that has nothing to do with how often something breaks down, freak weather or otherwise, but about how it operates 99.9% of the time.

If you're not familiar with the electrical grid, one concept that is really important to understand is that power generation and power consumption have to be more or less identical all the time. It has to be perfectly in balance at 60hz with room for error of only .05hz. If you put in too little electricity, the frequency drops, and power plants will automatically shut down causing a system wide power outage. If you put in too much, the frequency increases and you end up with fires but protection systems again just cause a blackout.

Consumers, you and I, we don't use power very consistently, and its a bit like rush hour with the streets, where on a Sunday morning the streets are empty but on a Monday morning the next day its gridlocked from high usage.

With nuclear and gas reactors, this is not a problem, you can "turn up the juice" on demand like adjusting the flame on your stovetop. And it doesn't matter if its 6PM in winter and the sunset when there is peak demand as everyone is returning home and charging their electric cars back up, because it doesn't matter if its a calm day with no wind or the sun has set, the nuclear and gas reactors can adjust. This means they are reliable and scalable.

By unreliable, what these terms in the industry refer to is to the fact that they can't do the before mentioned adjustment to produce exactly how much power is demanded by the consumer regardless of the season, time of day, or wind conditions. So solar may be super effective providing power at 1PM, but if its the winter time and people aren't running their air-conditioners and everyone is at work not using much electricity, what is happening? The solar is pumping out big power, and the nuclear and gas reactors are scaled back on output. If you're a nuke/gas investor, you can see how displacing your output can hurt your bottom line, and so unreliable power sources (perhaps better named "inconsistent" but I didn't make up the terms) can cause grid instability.

If you had a cheap way to store energy, none of this would matter you would just make way more solar and wind power than you need, and just draw on demand, but this hasn't really been made cost effective yet (they are experimenting with molten salt solar but this will probably still only be used in the deserts where the land isn't used for anything else and you have strong sun throughout the year).

 

[fossil]

saying that renewables cannot provide reliable 60 cycle power simply isn't true, inverters do it all day every day.
For those who don't know. Most generators in wind turbines produce Alternating Current (AC) electricity (690VAC 3 phase). These turbines convert this AC electricity to Direct Current (DC) with a rectifier, and then back to AC using an inverter. The purpose of this, is so the frequency and phase of the electricity is in line with that supplied by the grid. Home solar systems that sell power back to the grid work in a similar way and have done so for years.

Gravity storage, water storage, molten salt, battery (not necessarily lithium BTW) are often dictated by location. Hydrogen on the other hand can work anywhere. Whether it's stored as gas, liquid or hydrogen peroxide (for fuel cells) it can be generated by excess (free electricity) and stored to be used to generate power as needed. With wind power expected to double between 2021 and 2027 we'll see what the free market brings. Europe has even started using hydrogen to power trains so generating power is a small step.

 

[JASmith]

saying that renewables cannot provide reliable 60 cycle power simply isn't true, inverters do it all day every day.

I don't know if you're trolling? I said that solar and wind are not able to produce a consistent level of power 24x7x365, or scale on demand. Its the grid as a WHOLE that has to maintain 60hz by balancing power intput with power consumed, which means you have to be able to scale your power generators to match the demand.

Explain to me how your solar panel is going to output the same power at 1PM as it does at 1AM, or how you're going to vary the power output to decrease in the middle of the day when people are at work, and increase when its still dark out at 7AM when people are running their blow dryers getting ready for work or coming home and charging their vehicles in the dark when back home?

I think I made that limitation pretty clear, and its that limitation that forces reliable/scalable power producers to vary their own power greatly to compensate for this shortfall in solar and wind, as you can't just crank up or down the juicy juice on your windmill or solar farm, its going to produce what it can when it can, whatever that happens to be. This is what causes grid instability.

Gravity storage, water storage, molten salt, battery (not necessarily lithium BTW) are often dictated by location.

None are cost effective to date, and basic law of thermodynamics also says that "you can't even break even" meaning that you lose efficiency when converting the electricity into say potential kinetic energy (pumping water into a tower) and then back into electricity.

Hydrogen on the other hand can work anywhere. Whether it's stored as gas, liquid or hydrogen peroxide (for fuel cells) it can be generated by excess (free electricity) and stored to be used to generate power as needed. With wind power expected to double between 2021 and 2027 we'll see what the free market brings. Europe has even started using hydrogen to power trains so generating power is a small step.

Electrolysis is the least efficient way to make hydrogen though, almost all of the energy is wasted as heat.

That's why almost all the hydrogen today is made from, oops, fossil fuel. There's also the chicken and egg problem with a hydrogen economy. The world isn't going to invest in hydrogen without a hydrogen storage/delivery system in place everywhere, and nobody is investing in that when there isn't a fleet of hydrogen consuming vehicles in place.

ICE to HEV to PHEV to PHEV long-range to EV transition by contrast is organic, the fossil fuel and electric grid system can evolve piecemeal, slowly, and organically with the growth.

 

[fossil]

I don't know if you're trolling? I said that solar and wind are not able to produce a consistent level of power 24x7x365, or scale on demand. Its the grid as a WHOLE that has to maintain 60hz by balancing power intput with power consumed, which means you have to be able to scale your power generators to match the demand.

Explain to me how your solar panel is going to output the same power at 1PM as it does at 1AM, or how you're going to vary the power output to decrease in the middle of the day when people are at work, and increase when its still dark out at 7AM when people are running their blow dryers getting ready for work or coming home and charging their vehicles in the dark when back home?

I think I made that limitation pretty clear, and its that limitation that forces reliable/scalable power producers to vary their own power greatly to compensate for this shortfall in solar and wind, as you can't just crank up or down the juicy juice on your windmill or solar farm, its going to produce what it can when it can, whatever that happens to be. This is what causes grid instability.

None are cost effective to date, and basic law of thermodynamics also says that "you can't even break even" meaning that you lose efficiency when converting the electricity into say potential kinetic energy (pumping water into a tower) and then back into electricity.

Electrolysis is the least efficient way to make hydrogen though, almost all of the energy is wasted as heat.

That's why almost all the hydrogen today is made from, oops, fossil fuel. There's also the chicken and egg problem with a hydrogen economy. The world isn't going to invest in hydrogen without a hydrogen storage/delivery system in place everywhere, and nobody is investing in that when there isn't a fleet of hydrogen consuming vehicles in place.

ICE to HEV to PHEV to PHEV long-range to EV transition by contrast is organic, the fossil fuel and electric grid system can evolve piecemeal, slowly, and organically with the growth.

you keep arguing the point no one disputes, everyone knows renewables are not steady state. sun rises and sun sets, wind blows and then it doesn't, to keep beating that drum is trolling.

you fail to understand that efficiency is a moot point when the energy source is effectively free. energy that is idled or otherwise wasted is inefficient, capturing as much as possible is not. It does not matter of some of the energy is wasted during storage or recovery what matters is that most is stored for later use. I would remind you of the first law of thermodynamics
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Alternatively, some sum it up as "the conservation of energy." Ultimately, the First Law of Thermodynamics is a statement that energy can be transferred between the system and the surroundings through the transfer of heat or by the performance of mechanical work.

I was not getting into the weeds talking about a hydrogen economy of consuming vehicles you are. I was talking about the subject of this thread, having enough power for the grid to charge EVs. Hydrogen vehicles at this point are a pipe dream, hydrogen power generation is not. Electricity is the best medium of energy transfer we have at this point and renewables decentralize that making us more secure. No worrying about the next hurricane driving up the cost of fuel, no worrying about what OPEC does. I know it's a bitter pill for traditional energy suppliers. Fact is, the rest of the industrialized world is making it happen, making it work while some here only want to preserve the oil and coal industry.

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