Long rant, make coffee and come back or skip to next post now....
If you are remotely interested in Vehicles, or even if you are not, you can't look at any form of media now without having something glossy and hyped rammed down your throat about electric Vehicles. The most sedate it gets is the never ending " Banning of IC cars by 20xx in whichever" place or that auto makers are working feverishly to bring out 100 new models in teh next 5 years..... Which coincidently, is an actual scale widely flung around.
We know there is now the technology for cars to cover decent distances, to recharge in a -reasonable- time frame and that many of the past objections are gone. Today our " green" party, the biggest pack of Idiot ratbags Imaginable ( And yes, I must own up to voting for them once about 25 years ago) called for a ban of all IC car sales in OZ by 2030.
And therein lies the root of my face palm and urge to go beat my head on a brick wall.
These same whining morons are already responsible for STATE wide blackouts due to the blowing up of coal fired power stations.
To stop a grid meltdown, the gubbermint went and put in a stack of diesel generators that consume 40,000L of Diesel an HOUR! That is one standard semi tanker load. per HOUR!
Yeah! that's doing wonders for the environment right?
The whole EV thing is a complex one but my biggest concern and where I see the real handbrake is feeding all these clean wonderful cars with power.
I think it's far from the simple thing of generation growing to meet the demand that many Ev proponents make out. I also think it's a lot more than a localised consideration. There are few countries with abundant power supply and fewer still that have or will go near being renewable. Most of the western world does not have a lot of power to spare and even in this day and age, it only takes one hot day to have rolling blackouts because the grid can't keep up. Here it's getting much worse thanks to all the save the planet types and their " Renewable" generation that is unstable, un predictable and very undependable.
The demand on the grid worldwide is growing all the time. The green washed thing of coal is evil and must be stopped now reduces capacity and stability. On one hand you have the green washed trying to reduce generation at the same time promoting the increase of consumption. Nothing wrong with that hypocricy, much! It takes a LOT of renewable power to equal one fossil fired station and the renewable is far from stable and dependable.
In a decade, the demand on grids around the world will have grown through all the things that are reliant on it now. Population, business, industry, quality of life improvements Like AC, large TV's and so it goes.
I don't know where to find the info of demand Vs generation relationships but it sure would be interesting to see the projections.
I don't know about other parts of the world but from what I'm reading, The take up of PV is no where near like it is here in oz hich is understandable given the weather in a lot of the northern Hemisphere. I think rather than have the big blattery, the money should have been spent on putting more localised power where it is needed in the form of solar. Unfortunately the green obsessed and Crazy SA gubbermint is so hell bent on being able to make stupid claims, they do it at the cost of sound practices and stability of power for the state.
I really don't think most of the greenwashed / EV proponents have any idea of the amount of energy contained in liquid fuels, the size of any type of battery to store the same amount of energy as in an average fuel tank and I don't think they understand what that energy equates to in electrical generation terms. Multiply that out be every car however many there are in your street let alone suburb and city, and the numbers become overwhelming.
Compare that to the amount of power a city generates now and one will get some perspective how mammoth a task this switch to electric really is.
Here's a real quick one....
My 4WD has a 100L tank. Yes, large by sedan standards but around here, a significant part of the local transport.
Diesel is about 10.7Kw of energy per litre. Let's call it 10 for ease of my poor mathematics.
100L in my tank x10 Kwh = 1000 KWh.
My 6.5 Kw solar system is averaging with weather about 25KwH a day atm being summer here. 5kwh is the standard for new systems being installed now but a lot larger than most older ones being 1.5-2 Kw.
If I put my 25kwh a day JUST into my vehicle, Thats going to take 40 days on average to give me ONE tankfull of Diesel. And now of course I must dra everything from the grid for household needs.
Lets halve that as a closer to average sort of tank capacity. 500KWH, 20 days at 25KWH per day.
Look at it another way. Average home here for a family of 4 my power bill says is about 30 KWH a day. 50L of fuel in the average family car, and few families have just one here, 500Kwh / 30 Kwh = 16 days average power use in that vehicle.
Most people I know fill up at least once a week. 2000Kwh month for the car, 30Kwh x 30 days = 900 KWH for the home.
Anyone getting the picture of the energy load we are talking about here?
That average family car electric needs is worth more than 2 average homes electric consumption per month. If they have ONE car. I l oked up the numbers, 2.28 for Oz with 35% of households owning 3 or more.
US, looks exactly the same, canada a bit less, 1,8 cars per family.
So in reality, the average home in these countries would have 4-5 times the demand on the grid for power for their ev's than they are using in their homes now.
At best, the number of houses in your street as far as power consumption goes just tripled. More likely, it just multiplied by a factor of at least 5.
In every street in every suburb in every city and town right across the country......
How many homes do you think will be able to have enough panels to charge their vehicles up in even a week even if they covered the whole block and used the panels as a roof?
When you break it down like this, you start to see the incredible change in the grid infrastructure that is going to be needed to replace IC vehicles.
Sure it won't happen over night, it can't! If the the take up was too quick ( and ev sales are LESS than 1% overall atm) they would hit a tipping point where all the cars were taking the power and there was non left to run the factories trying to make the things!
How long before you think the grid where you live will be able to handle that 500% ++ increase in demand, and what do you think the price of power might be to pay for the infrastructure to supply it?
More over, is there even space to put the infrastructure in place? Pretty sure no city is going to have the capacity to distribute 500% mo0re power on existing cabling and the question would then be, is there the space in the ground with everything else to put cables and distribution equipment in place 2with 5x the capacity of what is there now?
How big are the cables going to be on the power poles and how heavy? How expensive will they be with up rated substations, transformers and so it goes.
Of course then there is the thing that comes to mind for me with a personal ( repeated) experience.
My Father lives almost 400 KM away from me. The journey is basicaly up a highway for 2 hours, a 7 km crawl through the bypass of the next major city and then another 1hr, 20 min hop up the other side of the highway to his place. That highway goes another 600KM to the next major city.
In the middle of that 7 Km stretch there is a 2 petrol stations. The one opposite the McDonalds is the busiest and the Maccas can not be got near when its holiday time as it's the only thing on the highway till you get further up to when my father lives.
That service station is VERY busy with people filling up as it's the last fuel for about 2 hours. If you have come from where dad is which is the next major town and you are towing a boat or caravan, You are going to need a long range tank to make it with out a top up.
EV's on average take an hour to recharge IF they are on a rapid charger. Many take much longer. How long does it take one to fill their tank with petro fuel? 5, 10 Min? I'd reckon there are about 20 pumps at that servo opposite Maccas. that would mean that when the line is out onto the road, each pump should service a minimum of 6 cars per hour. 20 pumps, 120 cars per hour.
Now, if each car even takes 30 min to recharge bearing in mind they would have nearly all just driven 150KM and have another 200 to go to the next place that would have a charging station, those 20 outlets are only going to service 40 Vehicles. in other words, you are going to have to put in at least 3 times the charging stations as fuel pumps. And unless they are all super charger type setups, the far more likley charging time is 2-3 Hours.
Geez, won't that be fun turning your 4 hour trip into a 7 hour one and trying to amuse the kids at maccas for 3 hours. I can see a real possibility of the accident rate going up on that section of road due to fatigue and distraction by the extended journey time.
But wait, there's More....!
As its a big selling point to have " destination Charging" with tesla at least, put a charging station in every parking bay at maccas so people can go in , grab a bite and a coffee and have a break while their car charges up. Tesla luckily it's only an hour.
I looked up that a tesla can suck down 120Kw at a charging station. On 240V that's nearly 500A. Yes, the voltage is actually a bit higher but that's irrelevant. it's the watts that count. A normal house connection here is 80A and it would be extremely rare to find a single place sucking down that much power.
Let say there are 20 Charging stations in the carpark at maccas, that's 2.4 Mw of power just at that site . Across the road in the servo, there is at least another 20 and another 2.4Mw. How many other sites will that segment of the grid be feeding and further back, how many will be in the area supplied buy the local sub and power stations? Those 2 sites are across the road from one another so how big are the cables going to have to be just to feed 2 places?
That sort of power wouldn't be used by factories of that size so to have 2 small sites pulling that down.... Then of course there are the other food joints about 500M up the road that also fill up at holiday time and would no doubt also have charging in order to get business in the door be the power paid for or not. Can't see how they could afford to give it away on that scale unless the price of a Burger in the restaurant became 25 bucks.
Another thing that's not mentioned with charging time with teslas is they quote an hour. That's true if the thing isn't completely flat which we'll assume it is not and people leave a small reserve as one normally would with a petrol car. You go to the supercharger and plug in next to the guy that just pulled up. The charger is current limited and you are only going to get 30Kw being the second car to plug in rather than the 120Kw which is the max charge rate. Because the guy beside was before you but still needs to do a full charge more or less, your recharge could take 2 hours not 1. And that is if it's getting full power in the first place and the site isn't limited on it's max current draw because of all the other stations and the wiring at the power pole.
To me the whole EV thing is one big distraction and bundle of BS.
Given the western world still pulls the majority of it's power from fossil fuel going electric is really only moving the emissions from one place of generation to another anyhow.
