Will The Grid Accomodate Electric Cars?

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December 8, 2021 by Ray Payne
Is Anyone Listening?

BY BRYAN PRESTON

Depending on how and when you count, Japan’s Toyota is the world’s largest automaker. According to Wheels, Toyota and Volkswagen vie for the title of the world’s largest, with each taking the crown from the other as the market moves. That’s including Volkswagen’s inherent advantage of sporting 12 brands versus Toyota’s four. Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, and Bentley are included in the Volkswagen brand family.

GM, America’s largest automaker, is about half Toyota’s size thanks to its 2009 bankruptcy and restructuring. Toyota is actually a major car manufacturer in the United States;
in 2016 it made about 81% of the cars it sold in the U.S. right here in its nearly half a dozen American plants. If you’re driving a Tundra, RAV4, Camry, or Corolla it was probably American-made in a red state. Toyota was among the first to introduce gas-electric hybrid cars into the market, with the Prius twenty years ago. It hasn’t been afraid to change the car game.

All of this is to point out that Toyota understands both the car market and the infrastructure that supports it perhaps better than any other manufacturer on the planet. It hasn’t grown its footprint through acquisitions, as Volkswagen has, and it hasn’t undergone bankruptcy and bailout as GM has. Toyota has grown by building reliable cars for decades.

When Toyota offers an opinion on the car market, it’s probably worth listening to. This week, Toyota reiterated an opinion it has offered before. That opinion is straightforward: The world is not yet ready to support a fully electric auto fleet.

Toyota’s head of energy and environmental research Robert Wimmer testified before the Senate this week, and said: “If we are to make dramatic progress in electrification, it will require overcoming tremendous challenges, including refuelling infrastructure, battery availability, consumer acceptance, and affordability.”

Wimmer’s remarks come on the heels of GM’s announcement that it will phase out all gas internal combustion engines (ICE) by 2035. Other manufacturers, including Mini, have followed suit with similar announcements.

Tellingly, both Toyota and Honda have so far declined to make any such promises. Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer when you take its boat, motorcycle, lawnmower, and other engines it makes outside the auto market into account. Honda competes in those markets with Briggs & Stratton and the increased electrification of lawnmowers, weed trimmers, and the like.

Wimmer noted that while manufactures have announced ambitious goals, just 2% of the world’s cars are electric at this point. For the price, range, infrastructure, affordability, and other reasons, buyers continue to choose ICE over electric, and that’s even when electric engines are often subsidized with tax breaks to bring pricetags down.

The scale of the switch hasn’t even been introduced into the conversation in any systematic way yet. According to FinancesOnline, there are 289.5 million cars just on U.S. roads as of 2021. About 98 percent of them are gas-powered. Toyota’s RAV4 took the top spot for purchases in the U.S. market in 2019, with Honda’s CR-V in second. GM’s top seller, the Chevy Equinox, comes in at #4 behind the Nissan Rogue. This is in the U.S.market, mind. GM only has one entry in the top 15 in the U.S. Toyota and Honda dominate, with a handful each in the top 15.

Toyota warns that the grid and infrastructure simply aren’t there to support the electrification of the private car fleet. A 2017 U.S. government study found that we would need about 8,500 strategically-placed charge stations to support a fleet of just 7 million electric cars. That’s about six times the current number of electric cars but no one is talking about supporting just 7 million cars. We should be talking about powering about 300 million within the next 20 years if all manufacturers follow GM and stop making ICE cars.

Simply put, we’re gonna need a bigger energy boat to deal with connecting all those cars to the power grids. A LOT bigger.

But instead of building a bigger boat, we may be shrinking the boat we have now. The power outages in California and Texas — the largest U.S. states by population and by car ownership — exposed issues with powering needs even at current usage levels. Increasing usage of wind and solar, neither of which can be throttled to meet demand, and both of which prove unreliable in crisis, has driven some coal and natural gas generators offline. Wind simply runs counter to needs — it generates too much power when we tend not to need it, and generates too little when we need more. The storage capacity to account for this doesn’t exist yet.

We will need much more generation capacity to power about 300 million cars if we’re all going to be forced to drive electric cars. Whether we’re charging them at home or charging them on the road, we will be charging them frequently. Every gas station you see on the roadside today will have to be wired to charge electric cars, and charge speeds will have to be greatly increased. Current technology enables charges in “as little as 30 minutes,” according to Kelly Blue Book. That best-case-scenario fast charging cannot be done on home power. It uses direct current and specialized systems. Charging at home on alternating current can take a few hours to overnight to fill the battery, and will increase the home power bill. That power, like all electricity in the United States, comes from generators using natural gas, petroleum, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, or hydroelectric power according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I left out biomass because, despite Austin, Texas’ experiment with purchasing a biomass plant to help power the city, biomass is proving to be irrelevant in the grand energy scheme thus far. Austin didn’t even turn on its biomass plant during the recent freeze.

Half an hour is an unacceptably long time to spend at an electron pump. It’s about 5 to 10 times longer than a current trip to the gas pump tends to take when pumps can push 4 to 5 gallons into your tank per minute. That’s for consumer cars, not big rigs that have much larger tanks. Imagine the lines that would form at the pump, every day, all the time, if a single charge time isn’t reduced by 70 to 80 percent. We can expect improvements, but those won’t come without cost. Nothing does. There is no free lunch. Electrifying the auto fleet will require a massive overhaul of the power grid and an enormous increase in power generation. Elon Musk recently said we might need double the amount of power we’re currently generating if we go electric. He’s not saying this from a position of opposing electric cars. His Tesla dominates that market and he presumably wants to sell even more of them.

Toyota has publicly warned about this twice, while its smaller rival GM is pushing to go electric. GM may be virtue signalling to win favor with those in power in California and Washington and in the media. Toyota’s addressing reality and its record is evidence that it deserves to be heard.

Toyota isn’t saying none of this can be done, by the way. It’s just saying that so far, the conversation isn’t anywhere near serious enough to get things done.



YOU CAN IGNORE REALITY, BUT YOU CANNOT IGNORE THE CONSEQUENCES OF IGNORING REALITY!

https://veteranweb.asn.au/news/is-anyone-listening/
 
I have been saying this also, it seems like it would be obvious though. Snowflakes seem to think electricity is free and of infinite supply.

I'm not against electric vehicles actually. But we're a long way from that being practical. I've been saying that when I can take an electric truck, towing a trailer, drive it at least 300 miles, pull into a charge station like you would a gas station, and charge it back up in 10 minutes, I'll be all for it.

I really like that last sentence about ignoring reality. The problem is people are too stupid to know what reality looks like and polititians prey on them to get votes.
 
Good read and makes sense, leave it up to the govt. to create a problem and then let someone down the road try to figure out a solution to the problem that they created!
 
Aspen Colorado had its natural gas service severely interrupted at the last few days of 2020. Earth First was written on the gas lines that had been tampered with.
Black Hills energy, the local gas supplier bought up hundreds if not thousands of electric space heaters to give out to people without heat. It also happened to be very cold for the few days it took to get the gas service up and running.

There hasn't been much about it, but IIRC there were concerns about the electric grid in the area being able to handle all the space heaters.
However, the greenies want us to use electric cars, electric everything because in their delusion they think it will save the planet. If the local grid can't handle a thousand space heaters, how is it going to handle all the electric cars being plugged in? How about not heating with natural gas, wood, or other non-electric fuels, how much electricity does it take to keep a house warm when its -10?

I would be surprised if all the electrical generating capacity in the state of Colorado could meet the demands of the less populated western half of the state during a cold winter night, let alone all the electric cars they want to have.
 
Just how bad would the Virginia snow storm traffic jam been if the road was full of dead electric cars, all would have needed to be towed after full discharge. Batteries often are ruined from complete discharge and freezing. Just another fascist plan to control/alter western civilization.
 
I do not have the information, but I would like to know the true efficiency of electric cars.

Lets just say the power is generated by a gas turbine power plant, it then has to be carried long distance, then stepped down to a level that can be handled locally, then distributed, then turned into DC power to charge the batteries, and then the batteries finally can turn it into mechanical energy.
I am guessing that there is a significant loss of energy in the process to turn natural gas into mechanical energy in an electric motor.
 
Energy is a stepped pyramid(of efficiency) the further you drop down the side the wider(less efficient energy becomes). The top is nuclear, petroleum, coal, ethanol, wood are steps downward. When you make electricity from any there is a loss(heat and other byproducts). It takes more (volume) of ethanol to generate hp than straight gasoline,mileage drops as percentage of ethanol increases. Not sure where the plastics and rare metals are coming from or acquired for producing enough solar wind equipment to make up for the inefficiency. Especially considering the democrats are pushing the Great Reset(build back better, Green New Deal) which requires 30% of all Earth be "turned back to nature". All agriculture is the be "reimagined". I guess we will all be eating bugs. Musk recently responded, you can increase the range(EV) if you just turn off the heat and radio. Not sure that works for north half of U.S. or Virginia snowstorms.
 
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When farms are all owned by folks who know nothing about farming we will go hungry.
When farms are owned by corporations gmo seed will be the least of our worries.

In the past farms were scattered all over the country. They would not all fail at one time.
Now farming is increasingly large and irrigated and much in one place. It could all fail at once.

If you think gov is in control of to much now wait till they control the food.
The professors at UT said this would happen back in the 70's. I had trouble believing it then.
 
When farms are all owned by folks who know nothing about farming we will go hungry.
When farms are owned by corporations gmo seed will be the least of our worries.

In the past farms were scattered all over the country. They would not all fail at one time.
Now farming is increasingly large and irrigated and much in one place. It could all fail at once.

If you think gov is in control of to much now wait till they control the food.
The professors at UT said this would happen back in the 70's. I had trouble believing it then.
 
^^^^ Communist regimes have a history of 'central planners' destroying the agricultural production of their countries in order to suppress the opposition among the populace. Do a search of the famines created during Stalin's rein of terror in the Soviet Union or China's Mao Zedong in communist China.
Give some thought to the potential of America's central planners regarding the switch to Green Energy or the production of food. It is quite frightening.
 
i have a friend who has been a lineman for a very long time and runs a crew these days for one of the two major electrical supply companies here in the state.

hes made it very clear to me when asked that the grid is several decades away from even 50% electrification of the US fleet.

we're not even close.

electric only by 2035 is a pipe dream.


if i had to guess these claims are what corporations refer to BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goals

something to strive for that they know is impossible, but helps to give drive to achieve above and beyond what would otherwise be accepted as status quo.

however with the current political climate of course, the anti-oil industry is taking those things literally and believe them to be the letter of the law as far as what these corporations are going to do.
 
Upgrading the grid is not just building more or adding on to existing. That has been done already to the point that lots of places brown outs occur when everyone comes home from work and clicks on the heat or ac.
To do what the electric cars will need power companies will have to start at the sub station with the upgrade.
That is if the transmission lines are up to the job. If not then start at the generation site.
This as said will take some time and the cost will be enormous.
 
Lol the electric company people I know say that eliminating just gasoline, leaving trucks and heavy equipment on diesel alone for now, but just replacing all gas cars with electric cars, will require 3x the power we now generate.

No one wants nuclear, coal, or gas fired plants, there's not enough hydro, sorry but solar and wind won't get it done. Then add to that, no one wants to live next to transmission lines now, so good luck adding more across the country.

Not going to happen, no matter how many lies they tell. If they eliminate gas, you might want to learn how to saddle and harness horses.
 
Oil is above $86.00 a barrel. That translates to about $5.00 a gallon for gasoline beginning this spring. Where can I get a horse?
 
Originally Posted By: ADKOil is above $86.00 a barrel. That translates to about $5.00 a gallon for gasoline beginning this spring. Where can I get a horse?

I'm thinking maybe a dog sled with wheels on it!
 
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