(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The idea that a renewable power grid and electric vehicles are incompatible overlooks the obvious [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-07 The latest Post story, tells the story of how a New Mexico family addressed an unreliable power supply by getting an inverter that allowed them to power appliances with their Chevy Bolt (author’s note: I recently bought a Bolt, but for the purposes of this story, it could be almost any EV). That car’s 66 kilowatt/hour battery pack was more than enough to make sure the food in the fridge stayed cold, the lights stayed on, and the family remained connected even as their neighbors were waiting in the dark. Today, Graham primarily powers his home appliances with rooftop solar panels and, when the power goes out, his Chevy Bolt. He has cut his monthly energy bill from about $220 to $8 per month. “I’m not a rich person, but it was relatively easy,” says Graham “You wind up in a magical position with no [natural] gas, no oil and no gasoline bill.” It’s the kind of setup that seems to work for so many, but which article after article insists can’t possibly work for America as a whole. He’s another excerpt from that MIT article, one that fundamentally misses the problem as it looks at “four giant lithium-ion storage projects” that total 300 megawatts. Collectively, they would add enough storage capacity to the grid to supply about 2,700 homes for a month (or to store about .0009 percent of the electricity the state uses each year). Just down the page from that comes a chart showing that renewable energy climbs sharply in the middle of the day, so that “supply far outstrips demand.” In fact, California already produces gigawatts of power in the peak periods for solar and wind than it ever needs. If California were to increase to 80% renewables, a goal that’s supposedly just a decade away, it “would mean massive amounts of surplus generation during the summer months, requiring 9.6 million megawatt-hours of energy storage. Achieving 100 percent would require 36.3 million.” Note that in both these cases, California’s overproduction of power is regarded as a bad thing. Meanwhile, in the Bloomberg article comes the warning that electrical service stations are going to require huge amounts of energy. Researchers found that by 2030, electrifying a typical highway gas station will require as much power as a professional sports stadium—and that’s mostly just for electrified passenger vehicles. As more electric trucks hit the road, the projected power needs for a big truck stop by 2035 will equal that of a small town. There are some good points in the study behind the Bloomberg article because the main focus isn’t really on the idea that EVs are energy hogs destined to require huge new amounts of electricity. It’s just that an attempt to replicate an existing large truck stop with its electrical equivalent would require something like a 5-megawatt connection to the grid, the kind of line that takes years to permit and build. What follows is a huge amount of panic about how far behind we are in accomplishing this. There is, of course, an easy solution—don’t do that. As the same Bloomberg article points out, the majority of existing EV charging stations, which provide room for a few vehicles at a time, don’t require anything like the infrastructure of their “sports stadium” or “small town” mega charging stations. In fact, they require 35 times less power than what they picture as a “large car and truck stop in 2045.” So build a lot more small stops. This is an entirely new system of powering vehicles, one that is scalable to support the available grid at almost any location. But most of the studies remain fixated on replicating a distribution network that was designed around trucks delivering thousands of gallons of petroleum to leaky underground storage tanks. If there is anything America is not short on, it’s parking lots. Just about any parking lot can be an EV charging station without the need for siting underground storage or the environmental impact work this requires. Right now, the average existing small gas station property sells for around $2 million. It’s considerably more expensive to build a new one. A fast charging site for eight vehicles costs around $250,000, and the average upgrades to the local grid to support such a station are relatively small. When stations get bigger, costs can absolutely rise sharply. So don’t do that. Make charging stations small and frequent instead of large and scattered. That better suits the needs of many EVs, especially those (like mine) that don’t charge particularly fast, even at the best chargers, or have extravagantly long ranges. That’s one part of the equation. But the bigger part—the far more important part—is what’s hinted at in that Washington Post article where the family kept their soda cold during a blackout. EVs aren't just transportation. They’re also storage. Remember that “giant” project to store 300 megawatts? That’s in California. There are 17.7 million cars in California. Currently, just under 900,000 of those are electric. If each of those cars has a battery the size of a Chevy Bolt—again, the cheapest EV out there—that’s 59,400 megawatt/hours of storage. Almost 200 times that “giant” project. Of course, even if all 17.7 million cars in California were EVs, their combined batteries would still be too small to soak up the 36.3 million gigawatts of excess power, because that’s a ridiculous number. New York City consumes 11,000 megawatt-hours of electricity on an average day. So the proposed level of storage would be enough to keep the lights on Broadway for over nine years. No one needs to try to soak up all the excess power created over the summer. it’s just silly. Especially as adding new power will bring other periods up to the point where there’s no need to try to shift power around over periods of weeks or months. What’s needed is just enough storage to keep the grid stable through periods of low production. It doesn’t have to be enough to sop up every drop, or to cover a situation that pretends that the entire state plunges into a no-sun, no-wind void for days. It needs to keep up with the need in the evenings, grab some of the power at peak, and in general, keep things smooth. Every million average EVs is over 60,000 megawatt-hours of power storage. They can do that. They can do that and still leave plenty of power on hand for the morning commute. While that Post story mentions purchasing a converter, more and more new EVs are coming with car-to-grid capability out of the box. Ford’s new F-150 electric pickup does this. It’s rapidly becoming a feature that many manufacturers are including and one that consumers are shopping for. If those vehicles are routinely hooked up in a 2-way connection, rather than just being clipped in during an emergency, they become a storage system that doesn’t require utilities to sweat over “grid-scale solutions.” There’s no doubt that moving the nation’s transportation system from petroleum to electric will require more electricity. After all, moving all that metal (and cargo) around is a lot of work. But as even that hand-wringing Bloomberg article points out, it’s not as much of an increase as many would pretend. Even if the world stopped making new gasoline-powered cars and trucks altogether by the early 2030s—an optimistic scenario—it would add no more than 15% to the world’s electricity consumption by 2040, according to an analysis by BloombergNEF. In the age of cheap wind and solar power, that’s not a lot. EVs aren’t a burden on an overtaxed grid. They’re the solution to storage that would be costly and difficult to match in stand-alone systems. Plus, they’re able to export their energy to other areas in a way that doesn’t require wires, by taking advantage of all that existing blacktop. Back to that latest Post article… Beyond serving as an emissions-free backup generator, the EV has the potential of revolutionizing the car’s role in American society, transforming it from an enabler of a carbon-intensive existence into a key step in the nation’s transition into renewable energy. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/7/2150194/-Electric-vehicles-are-not-a-threat-to-the-power-grid-they-re-the-salvation Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/