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For about a 3-day period during a historical heat wave throughout California we all did have to reduce our electricity usage for about 3 hours each day, which was mainly AC but also charging electric cars.
To conclude based on this that the grid is broken or that electrical cars (which mostly charge at night) are going to result in the grid deteriorating further makes no sense through.
No, that is not what leads to the conclusion. The conclusion is based on two things: Physics and mathematics.
What is happening now is merely a preview of things to come if we don't have the right conversations or people, as you are doing, dismiss the warnings some of us are issuing without making any real effort to understand.
About five years ago I designed and built (as in, I did it myself) a 13 kW solar array at home. Far more than we needed to supply the house. The plan was to use some of that for electric vehicles once they became viable. Note I didn't just say "affordable". The term "viable" is meant to include the entire ecosystem. As a comparison, a gasoline-powered vehicle is viable because you can easily refuel it without even thinking about it and it can be maintained and repaired anywhere and almost by anyone.
Anyhow. This led to me devoting a lot of time for about a year to try to understand energy, climate change and electric transportation realities. What I mean by that is that I invested time and effort seeing just how well the math and physics of what we were (and are) being told, actually align.
What I discovered was a surprise to me: They do not.
I wrote some code to simulate power requirements for a varying scale of EV adoption, all the way up to 300 million vehicles --our current fleet. The simulation predicted a need of between 900 GW and 1400 GW in addition to existing capacity. The current US capacity is 1200 GW. In other words, we need to double our power generation capacity and double (or more) our ability to transport power. As it turns out, this prediction was reasonably accurate.
One of the often hand-wavy things people talk about or write in articles is energy, rather than power. This is a huge mistake. Energy is power delivered over time. One can make outlandish claims about energy while ignoring the time element.
When, in a state like California, you have 31 million [0] EV's plug in to charge at, say, 6:00 PM every night, what you need is power, instantaneously, not energy. The fact that you generated <pick a number> of energy in the prior n days means nothing in that moment unless the energy was stored for delivery as power to each car in that instant.
What I discovered is that, at the end of the day, the hand-wavy stories just don't hold up. As a hypothetical, if you consume ten days worth of stored energy in one to nine nights, you are still short. The truth turns out to be that the EV problem, ultimately, is about power, not energy.
One way I think of this is that all 13 million+ households in CA [1] suddenly get TWO 5-ton air conditioning systems that are turned on every night at 6 PM for several hours. That's what we are talking about. And, no, we don't have the power and, if we had it, we could not deliver it.
So, yes, very much so: The grid is broken (in that it just can't cope with these loads) and a large installed base of electric cars will cause severe grid deterioration in multiple ways.
We can stick our heads in the sand an pretend this isn't so today because EV owners live in a privileged environment where they can take as much power as they need from the system and people, for the most part, don't notice any issues. I am going to guess that if we double the installed base of EV's in CA --which is mostly concentrated in large urban areas-- people will start to notice and this will lead to very interesting outcomes. I could get ugly for EV owners in so many ways.
I don't know how else to say it. I have written a lot about this. People prefer to be dismissive and continue to exist in ignorance of our future reality. We can't even build a high speed train and now we are talking about a transition to EV's that will require a doubling our our power generation and delivery capacity (this is absolutely indisputable). Why aren't we talking about mass adoption of nuclear power? It's because the easy political gains are not there, that's why.
[0] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/m...
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/CA/RHI725221
Please think it through?
I'll try to create a very simple hypothetical case to illustrate the problem and how to think about it:
Assume the average vehicle is driven 50 miles per day.
This includes commercial vehicles, long and mid haul semi trucks, work trucks, delivery vehicles, etc. In other words, the average daily per person numbers do not apply here (that would be around 25 to 45 miles per day, depending on location). I feel an average of 50 miles per day, regardless of vehicle class, is a reasonable number to use as a thinking tool to try to get a ROM (Rough Order of Magnitude) of the problem. The models I developed years ago were far more accurate than this, however, that kind of detail in a simulation is hard to convey in a post like this.
Assume, then, this to represent an average for all 30 million vehicles in CA.
The question:
How much POWER would this require?
Let's assume we use a Level 2 charger that would replenish 60 miles in an hour at 7 kW. Again, we are super-simplifying things here. For example, a semi truck or delivery van will be far less efficient and require charging at a much higher power level and longer charge duration. I am just trying to simplify this for the purpose of illustrating the problem.
Assuming 30 million vehicles charged simultaneously, this means we would need 210,000,000 kW
Let's have them charge with a uniform distribution across 24 hours. That means we need 8,750,000 kW
That's 8.75 GW.
A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. In other words, in this evenly distributed scenario we would need the output of 9 nuclear power plants for 24 hours to charge all vehicles in CA.
We need 9 NEW nuclear power plants in CA. I would round that to ten.
This is power over and above current generation and transport capabilities.
How long does it take to build just one nuclear power plant? Well, certainly longer than a high speed train. I think the range is between 25 years and impossible.
How about 10 of them? Never. Unless we stop talking about EV fantasy and start discussing reality. And that is: If we want EV's to take over we need to get serious about being able to massively expand power generation and delivery and we need to do that immediately.
No, it cannot happen by 2030. That's preposterous.
And, no, solar isn't going to do it. That's wishful thinking. A solar installation that can match a 1 GW nuclear power plant and deliver 1 GW 24/7 has to be built with a peak capacity of at least 10 GW. This is massive and more than most people can imagine in terms of land use, materials, batteries, etc.
And, BTW, the above super-simplified hypothetical isn't even close to just how bad things will be in reality. For example, if you assume that, say, 25% of vehicles will need fast or high power charging, the power demand will skyrocket. Remember that I said the problem is power, not energy. Power is what you need when you have to charge a bunch of cars simultaneously. That's because you have to do it given the time constraints of the task. You don't have 48 hours to charge a semi truck that just completed a thousand mile journey. At best your might have eight hours. And that requires power. A typical truck stop might have fifty to one hundred long-haul trucks in need of charging. What they demand is power in order to deliver the requisite energy in a given amount of time. The other thing it does not take into account is concentration. A city like Los Angeles will require a staggering amount of additional electricity to deal with EV's and it will have massive peaks that will dictate the size and shape of the required feeds.
Again, we can go head-in-the-sand or understand we have a very serious that requires at least a doubling of our power generation and distribution capacity. If we don't wake up to that right away it will be an absolute mess.
I could get into your comment about delaying charge and staggering. I have including that sort of thing in my models. It does not change peak power demand. Here's the simplest explanation: Imagine you slow charge 30 million cars for 12 hours and stagger 1/12th of them every hour as you proposed. Well, 12 hours into this charge methodology you have 30 million cars charging simultaneously. And, because cars are used every day, you pretty much end-up with 30 million cars charging 24/7. I am over-simplifying. The point is that the stagger idea seems to be an intuitive solutions (I thought so before I modeled it), yet it does not eliminate the fact that you have to deliver so many kWh (now talking energy) to so many cars within a narrow window of time. In real use very few will adopt EV's if they have to spend 24 hours charging.
Be careful with mixing physics/mathematical arguments and economic ones. If you want to talk physics, assume your (fairly generous) numbers of 8.75 GW. That's 9 nuclear power plants, as you mentioned. Or for solar, mean solar flux in CA is about 5 kWh/m^2 over a day, solar panels are about 20% efficient, that's 1 kWH/m^2/day = 24 m^2 / kW of panels = 24 km^2 / GW * 8.75 GW = 210 km^2 = an approximately 21 x 10 km solar array in the Mojave desert. That's well within the range of plausible land use. For wind, a typical offshore wind turbine generates about 8 MW of power, so we'd need about 1000 of them, turbine blades are about 750 feet across, figure 1/4 mile spacing, we'd cover 250 miles ~= less than half of California's coastline.
The reason these haven't been built yet is because of economics: it's not cost effective to invest this much when the demand isn't there yet. But then we're not going to get 31M car owners suddenly switching over to EVs. We'll get maybe 2-3M each year, switching over as they retire their old vehicles, and then we build one nuclear power plant, or 2 km^2 of solar, or 100 wind turbines, each year until the transition is complete.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_reac...
BTW, I built my model many years ago, way before anyone was talking about this. While it seemed to be a reasonable rough-order-of-magnitude model, it wasn't until the end of last year that I finally got confirmation that my model produced reasonable numbers. This by non other than Elon Musk himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcI6FaaDp8g&t=3510s
In this interview he says we at least double our power production capacity. We (US) have 1200 GW of installed capacity. That means we need at least another 1200 GW. Which means 1200 nuclear power plants.
That number, for me, gives the problem a dimension, a scale, that is difficult to understand in any other way. 1200 nuclear power plants is nothing less than daunting. In the context of not even being able to build a high speed train, I am not sure what the reality of nuclear power in this nation might look like in the next 50 to 100 years.
Of course, Elon is pushing solar. Great for some areas, not so for a good deal of the nation. Imagine, for example, if Florida depended 100% on solar. Yes, that's an extreme example, of course. Sometimes these are necessary to jolt people away from thinking about the fantasy of something and focus on reality. Solar in Maine or Illinois has very different prospects when compared to solar in Southern California, Arizona or Texas.
Solar isn't the solution. It is part of it, of course.
