Electric Vehicles

And you just stated the catch 22 that is the problem. Nobody wants to build an EV when there are no places to charge them and nobody want to build the infrastructure for non-existent vehicles. People won't buy the vehicles because of both reasons. It's one of the facts that makes a hybrid the only viable solution for the EV minded folks.

The liberals promoting this nonsense typically live in cities and have no knowledge of living in rural areas. I've lived in places where it was an hour's drive to the nearest supermarket!

Only by assuming EVs use much less energy per km than do gasoline powered vehicles, and by running the peak capacity plants full time.

Peak demand is presently handled using extra generation that is brought on line to match it. Typical demand peaks in the afternoon, 3PM to 7PM. This is when people start getting home and turning on their appliances and AC.

The peaker plants are typically less efficient, more expensive to run, and much less environmentally acceptable. For example, in Ontario, they are mostly coal and methane. This is because those are the plants that the utilities want to run as little as possible, so they only run them when demand is highest. There are even a few diesel engine generators in the mix, and wonder of wonders, even a few jet engine powered generators that have, on rare occasions, been used to meet peak demand.

The result of extra load without change to the grid will be a huge amount more coal gets burnt. And it will also mean that the grid is more heavily loaded at all hours, since some people will charge their vehicles at any given hour of the day regardless of the cost. So there will be more brown-outs and black- outs than previously, though maybe only incrementally.

If EVs ever get to the point of being true replacements for gasoline powered vehicles, the presumption has to be they will use similar amounts of energy at similar efficiencies, when you include the entire generation and distribution chain. That will require roughly a doubling of the total generation capacity. Though it may allow for some increased flexibility with regard to making the net demand more even.

Don't mistake me though. I'm keen for electric cars. Just that they will mean significant increased demand on the grid, and that will require new generation capacity. Preferably nukes, at least until we work the bugs out of fusion. Which isn't going to happen for a while. Socks

I drive more than 40 miles to the grocery store, let alone to work.

--scott

Yes, and every job I've had in the last 40 years has been in the range of

35 to 60 miles away.

And the next door neighbor also drives more than 40 miles to work.

However, unless where you work has the equipment and will allow you to recharge, you would be limited to working less than 20 miles away.

The wife works 30 miles away.

The majority of people do not live in some place like Manhatten.

You're either a real mountain man or an idiot too stupid to find a place to live near a store. Normal crock of shit you come to expect from commies who think they're something else. Now they're telling people they can't have an electric car. I already subsidize the big honking SUVs and pickups they use to haul a couple bags of groceries and their big screen TV.

Now they want to tell people they can't have an electric car. They don't care one bit about the marketplace, just resent those who act differently than them. Fancy themselves "country" or "rural" with their big modern SUVs and pickups, satellite dishes, granite countertops, Jacuzzi's, Ipods. Oh yeah, they're country all right.

My ma grew up on 160 acres of hardscrabble farm in the Missouri Ozarks. Her and her folks got there in a boxcar during the depression. Spent my summers there as a tyke in the 50's. Pulled water with a rope and bucket from the well, drank from a dipper, bathed outside in a washtub, ate fresh killed chicken and listened to Red Foley on the radio. Fetched wood from the woodpile for the stove, and picked ticks every night before bedtime. You could hear for miles, but might only hear a car or truck on the rocky RR once a day, and sometimes none a day. Couldn't see the road from the house, just sometimes a cloud of dust. If grand dad heard a car stop at the gate he'd get out his rifle and go to greet the visitor. Only time it happened when I was there over maybe 7 summers I heard the car take off and grand dad came back alone. That was a brother from Virginia that he hadn't seen for 20 years. Chased him off. Either grand dad was half-crazy or his brother was.

But he had no trouble going to Doniphan every week or so in his Ford pickup to pick up a block of ice from the ice house, chicken feed and whatever else we needed. I would ride in the pickup bed sitting on the burlap covering the ice.

Now I don't claim to be a country boy like so many here. I was raised in Chicago and I'm a city slicker. But I knew country. Country was a friend of mine. You are not country. You're writing on a computer and probably can't even chop wood.

Grand dad put his pickup truck to good use getting his house built and establishing his farm. Nowadays it might be easier and cheaper to have a truck drop it off. Those were different times. Everything he hauled when I was there could have been put in an electric if he left us kids at home. Doniphan was about 20 miles away with nothing in between.

I don't tell anybody what to drive. Suit yourself. Didn't tell grand dad to get rid of that icebox and buy a refrigerator either. Maybe the line wouldn't carry the juice. Only thing powered by electricity was the light bulbs and the radio. They didn't even get electricity until about 1950. That damn lib FDR was behind it, spreading that pernicious electricity all over the country, sapping the precious bodily fluids of America.

This bullshit about the market for electrics is just that. Bullshit.

225,956,060 of 285,230,516 U.S. population live in urban areas according to the 2000 census.

You can come up with all the reasons you want to say there's no market for electrics, but fact of the matter is you're just spouting your personal needs or preferences in a typical commie luddite fashion.

Remind me of my grand dad. Half-crazy and can't let go of the past.

--Vic

All evidence to the contrary, sir.

Hardly green, but 100's of times better than a similar gas car. Single point sources are much easier to clean up than many mobile ones. Also, dont forget hydro, wind etc.

Indeed. Algea et al has a great future.

 God it's great to be an American.................. 10-4!

All references easily google-able and readily available. Knock yourself out. Ben

The Walmart food store I go to is one and a half miles from me.Just across the highway from that store is the Lowe's store.There is a big shopping mall with a Sears store across the highway from me, about 275 footsteps to the Sears store.The animal health products store where I buy Pro Pac dog food for my dog is five miles from me.I hardly ever go anywhere else.If I was going to buy a new vehicle, I think I would be more interested in one of those new compressed air cars/small van, than an electric car.But as long as I can keep my old clunkers running ok I reckon I will stick with my old clunkers. cuhulin

Spec's from the Leaf wiki, battery capacity 24kw, with up to 90kw output (obviously brief) I doubt the software allows all 24 kw to be drained.. but thjere is way more than 7 kw available. Ben

That's true, but most EV's will be charged at night, when almost all powerplants are 'idling', and powerplants are ineffecient at idle. Ben

Wow...

40 miles per charge would work for 3/4's of all drivers. EV's will probably never be everyone's everything, but I think they have a future Ben

TVA currently has 6 GW available at night for 7 cents/kW-hr.

Bret Cahill

That doesn't include the 40 kWhr battery.

What's the weight of the vehicle?

Bret Cahill

Why does it always turn political at about the 30 post mark? Like clockwork...

let us not say, then, that "oil is manifestly biomassive," and ne'er, e''er call them, PetroleumTM.

thank *you*.

thus: ... but, ihe non-null result was told-of on the first page!

thus: when thou sayest, Dost I live in a timelike or spacelike world; you gotta be joking, mister F.! spacetime is just phase-space, but ... well, to myself!

thus: I like, er!

--les ducs d'oil!

--Light, A History!

Well, first, as was indicated in the part you snipped, that available generation is mostly coal. Oops.

And second, that's the marginal rate at night, not what they'd charge if demand increased by 6 GW. Want to know what they'd charge if demand increased that much? Look during the day when demand is that high. Oops.

Upthread the Nissan Leaf was claimed to have a 100 mile range on an 8 hour charge, 40 amps at 220 volts. That's

8.8 kW. Suppose that 100 mile range is 50 mph, or 2 hours. That's a sustained output of about 45 horsepower, not including efficiency of the rectifier and charging process, and the efficiency of the battery-electric motor combo on the car. I'm guessing those would probably knock that down by about 1/3 in total, but it's pretty much a guess, based on some very quick googling for efficiencies of such things. So it's probably only a sustained 30 horsepower or so. That's a pretty wimpy car, even for just commuting. My Nissan Versa, not a big car at all, has a 100 hp engine.

And even at that, the TVA's extra coal generation is only able to charge up about 680,000 of them. And that means running those coal plants an extra 8 hours per day, probably 5 days per week. And some people would use the "trickle" 20 hour charge because they don't have 220volt installs in their house or apartment, meaning the entire grid would be extra loaded pretty much all of the time.

And if the TVA burned that much extra coal, the air in Toronto would be brown. Well... More brown.

And 100 miles is probably not even close to most people's needs for something that requires 8 hours to charge. I'm going to need at least 300 miles, a much quicker charge, and a lot more power than 30 hp.

So, to recap: Only by assuming EVs use much less energy per km than do gasoline powered vehicles, and by running the peak capacity plants full time. Socks

Hybred is the way to go Electric motor,and propane motor is a perfect marriage. TreBert

[snip]

The Tesla achieves this range by playing on the fact that people who buy really expensive cars do not actually drive them very much. The quoted range of the Tesla assumes that you are running the batteries from 100% charge to 0% percent charge. If you actually drove your Tesla like that as a daily driven vehicle, you might not get a years' service from the tens of thousands of dollars worth of battery. If you want to max out the battery life, you never run them to less than

70% charge, so the Tesla's range is only 73 miles.