Elecgric Vehicles - F250 Lightning - Event Date: 16 Mar 2022

It was not meant to be political but a statement of fact. I will drop the opining on oil but towing with EV's may become practical if wireless charging via roadways were able to become a reality. That is something I read about in either PS or PM years ago, but nothing ever came of it. Fuel cells were the topic also, and I think that could have been a viable alternative as refueling would have been quick. However, avoiding contamination of the catalyst is a problem if one is using air. Also, rolling Dewar flasks for carrying pure liquid hydrogen would not have been good. CNG could have been used, but the hydrogen would need to be split from the carbon. Then how does one capture the carbon for re-use in industry or proper disposal? Each technology looks promising until one starts seeing the consequences of adopting it. Some of those can't be foreseen. 

I don't see how attributions that accuse the adminstation of deliberately increasing oil prices can be taken as anything but political.


That is not appropriate in this forum, but if we want to talk about facts in the energy area Im ready and able to do so.

First, on fuel energy density. A comparison was made between batteries and gasoline as vehicular energy storage. I stated that the chemical energy contained in the fuel was not pertinent to this comparison, because only about 25% of that energy makes it to the wheels. That is correct, and it is a good rough approximation to compare 10kwh of battery storage with 1 gallon of gasoline tank capacity.

None of that has anything at all to do with power plant efficiency. That only comes into play in effecting the direct and indirect/environmental costs of electricity. Which were not part of this thread till now.

But if you want to compare that with the direct and indirect/environmental costs of fossil fuel delivery we can do that.

In doing so though we cannot assume business as usual in the electricity generation energy mix because our energy extraction, production, delivery, storage, and distribution systems are multi decade long term investments.

So when you read these articles which say that all you're doing when you operate EVs using conventional fossil fuel powerplants   
is moving emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack, realize that those are written by fossil fuel company shills who want you to believe that nothing will change in the energy mix feeding the grid.

Those guys would like that to be true but it is a lie. The reality is that the grid is changing now, and fast:

Here are some facts: there were 23 GW of solar capacity installed in the us in 2021. 13 GW of wind. 6.6 GW of gas turbines. 1.1 GW of nuclear (btw I would also like that to be more but the reality is that nukes are very costly and time consuming to install so are not considered to be cost effective by the power producers who are making those investment decisions). Coal reduced by 4.6 GW.

See what's happening? Renewables are winning, and it's because they are cheap and easy. That was what I did as a career, and I'm proud of contributing to that accomplishment.

In the meantime even on the dirtiest grids EVs produce less emissions that ICE vrhicles. China has one of the dirtiest grids in the world but even there EVs are cleaner. Why? Because power plants are more efficient than car engines, quite a lot more efficient. 25% vs 35-40%. And the delivery system (wires vs fuel pipelines and trucks) is more efficient as well.

Here's another lie: the TX outages last winter were caused by renewables. In reality the vast majority of power generation that went offline were steam gas turbines because their plumbing systems froze up. Even a nuke went offline.


Why did they freeze up and why did this cause so much havoc? Because ERCOT is entirely within the state of TX, in the drive to deregulate everything and let the "free market" operate unfettered it cut it's interstate ties so it is not subject to FERC regulations. Look up ERCOT and FERC if you don't know what those are.

The result is that ERCOT does not have the proper systems and reserve capacity in place to handle these rare but entirely predictable weather events. Nor can it just buy power from it's neighboring states like everyone else can. And of course the systems engineers know all that very well.

This go it alone approach demonstrates the need for our critical infrastructure to be regulated. So please if we're going to have this discussion let's have it based on real data not superficial biased fake news stories.

As for EVs not being appropriate for a specific use group yet, I fully agree. As I stated.

Bit let's not fixate on that one weakness and use it to trash EVs in general without also acknowledging the big advantages they have in so many areas. That is not a balanced evaluation, and for most folk's needs an EV will do a great job.

Let's also please drop the whining about gas prices. The alternative exists where you can free yourself from the thrall of Big Oil price gouging and foreign manipulations effecting your energy costs. This has been going on at least since the early 70s.

Don't you think it's suspicious when some mideast dictator hiccups, within days you're paying double at the gas pump? Follow the money, who benefits? I'll give you one guess. Might it just possibly be the same guys who spend money trashing solar and EVs? What a surprise....

We have the technology now, unlike in the 70s, and it's within the grasp of average middle class Americans to get out of this cycle. Get an EV and install solar. If you decide for whatever political, lifestyle, or other reason not to do that, then that's your choice. Just please don't whine about it. Everyone seems to like to play the victim these days about one thing or another.

One question: How much more generating capacity will be needed to charge all of the EV's that are being pushed on the public? The grid has enough trouble supplying power for the use we have currently. There needs to be massive improvements in power generation and power transmission.

The oversimplified answer to your first question is that if all US cars were ev's they would require an increase of around 25-30% in total electric grid energy production. That's big but certainly not impossible to accomplish.

In practice things are of course more complicated, assuming we don't want to provide that additional electricity using traditional fossil fuel powerplants. This leads to a discussion of energy storage and dispatchabity.

There is only one reason I haven't bought an EV myself yet. I am waiting for bidirectional charging capability. That is already starting to be deployed in some other countries but has not yet been released in the US. There are a couple quite frustrating reasons for that which we don't need to get into here.

With bidirectional charging things change. EVs become part of the energy storage and delivery solution rather than a problem. That is because, as you rightly point out, renewables are not dispatchable power sources. Your friendly grid operator can't call up the old sun and wind gods and tell them to get going. Solar and wind come when they come. Renewables require storage to become dispatchable. Look up "duck curve" for more detailed info on this.

That lack of dispatchability is not a problem yet in most of the US because the solar/wind fraction of total grid capacity is still very low, around 5% nationally. We can and should put in tons more wind and solar in most parts of country and can do so without causing grid management issues. But in HI, CA, and several European countries the renewable content is now reaching the limit it can achieve without storage. That's somewhere around 15 to 20% if the renewables are solar and wind. HI and CA have the highest renewable fractions of any US states currently at around one third but that's because they have lots of hydro and even geothermal, which are dispatchable.

For solar and wind, more than around 15% means the plants need to be curtailed sometimes, which hurts their economics. Some curtailment is ok, the costs are getting low enough to tolerate that, but its not an ideal situation and to really get close to zero carbon power generation with renewables you have to have cost effective storage.

With widespread EV adoption there will be huge battery storage capacity already paid for that is sitting around doing nothing for the 90% plus of the time when the vehicles are not being used. For a residence as an example
an EV in the garage has capacity that is several times the daily energy requirement of the home it is connected to. So with bidirectional charging the vehicles can easily levelize the owners electrical demand while still retaining a very reasonable reserve capacity for daily transportation. All that is required is vehicles and charge points with bidirectional capability at homes and workplaces and web based comm infrastructure to manage it.

Renewables in combination with EV energy storage can then go to a much higher penetration level as a grid resource. Will that solve all the problems and let the grid go to 100% solar and wind? Of course not, nothing is that simple.

But it will be very significant, and does not require magic new voodoo technology like fusion. All the tech for it already exists and is proven.    

Forget stuff like fusion, it will have zero impact for the forseeable future. Let the researchers do their thing in the meantime. When I started working in solar over 40 years ago, it was already a proven technology that was commonly used in space and a few terrestrial applications. it's taken till just the last few years for it to be making a significant impact on the grid. That's just how long things take to change in the energy sector. It's not like the semiconductor or some other industries which change rapidly, the scale of investment required is so much larger. For example, over 90% of total polysilicon feedstock is now used for solar vs semiconductor fabrication, back in 95 it was the other way around, solar used to exist on the scrao material left over from the semiconducor industry.

Even existing technology like fission takes a very long time to deploy. Not counting the planning phase a nuke takes at least 5 years to construct and commission, and thats in France which has by far the most well developed nuclear industry of any country. The last one build in the US took over 40 years. In comparison, solar can be constructed and installed in a matter of a few months. Wind is a little longer not not much. And nukes are probably the most expensive generation option when the entire fuel cycle is considered. No private invetor wants to put them in. So while I'm in favor of building any and all non carbon based generation facilites realistically it's unlikely for nukes to have much impact for decades. Ditto for more large scale hydro, most all viable project sites are already taken.

So back to renewables and expansion past 15 or 20% via storage. There are interesting options for utility
scale storage being tested including straightforward technologies like using cranes to stack and unstack big chunks of concrete. Some of those will work out besides just big lithium battery banks. In the meantime bidirectional EV charging and increased renewable deployment in underserved markets will take us to the next level.

The take away here is that we can't let the quest for perfection get in the way of the good enough. That's not how any idustry investment operates including the energy sector. We need to get going faster with what we have and improve as we go along.

Ford has committed to providing bidirectional charging capability in the F150 out of the box. If that happens it should make Ford the market leader. Their first offering will allow off grid dischage usage only but that in itself is significant and theyre working on grid interconnected deployment as well. I want one.

Having to operate an ICE vehicle for awhile longer because of your range requirement doesn't make you a Luddite. Not at all. Just recognize that that is a personal choice and will be outside the norm in the future, and as such you shouldnt complain about the rising costs to do what you want to do. Heck, I decided to buy an airplane because I love flying, and that thing uses a lot of expensive avgas. 10 gallons an hour. I can drive all day in my Prius on 10 gallons. I have no justification now to whine about the cost of fuel, or ICE engine maintenance. That was my choice and I have to bear the costs or get out. The day I could hope to convert my plane to electric is very far off, much farther than for any road vehicle use.

Few people probably remember that there was a massive glut of oil during the first year of the pandemic. Enormous numbers of people curtailed driving to the point that refineries were scrambling to find places to store the raw crude. They cut back production, but that process took most of a year to get it down to the point where they didn't have to scramble for storage. In fact, there were tankers floating around with nowhere to put the crude.