No Politics: This Is Why Electric Vehicles Won't Work In The Long Run

[Rockhounder]

x2 particularly local power storage. Elon Musk is betting the farm on it. Interesting times. Moe

If you live in the desert, you are golden. When building our home in Big Bear now, we looked at availability of PV and wind. Unfortunately if you live in the forest, or along the coastline or mountainous areas, or in a heavily treed neighborhood, or behind a tall building, this is not an available option. Typical full house PV installations require an unimpeded square footage of area that is larger than most urban lots can provide. When you go to Home Depot, and see the Solar City guy there, and talk with them, they tell you flat out that many existing homeowners properties do NOT fit the minimum sun exposure standards to be able to install PV. They first go on GoogleEarth, then if it looks possible, they send out a technician to verify. We did this with our house in Pasadena about 6 years ago. We lived in the north west side of Pasadena just below Altadena, where the old established neighborhood had tons of huge pecan, oak, and avocado trees on everybodies lot. Our lot was 15,000sqft, and yet even with all that available land, the shade from our, and our neighbors trees caused the estimator to X-nay the project, as the shade crossing the proposed best install site was too restrictive.

The only way to enable a full power gen average for many homeowners would be to cut down all neighborhood trees. I hear from people living in Big Sur area, and along the northern cali coastal mountains, even if you do have open land for install, the number of non cloudy days makes it also a non starter. Our new house in Big Bear is also a non starter, with the tall sugar pine and Jeffrey pines towering 80 feet up all around everybodies properties, solar and wind is impossible. This is a big concern, especially with the new Jerry Brown mandate that ALL new houses built after 2020 MUST have zero net energy use, NO Exceptions. What a colossal fail. Dumb politicians never think about all the unintended consequences..... Unless new houses have acreage with sunlight, you will be S.O.L.

 

[herm]

we have a volt, 10.5 kwh useable energy and 4200 watts of solar, we make more than we use in the summer. As the rest of the house becomes more efficient we will use for power for cars, seems like it will work out about even over time.

 

[haven]

"Our new house in Big Bear is also a non starter, with the tall sugar pine and Jeffrey pines towering 80 feet up all around everybodies properties..."

A Sugar Pine cone dropping from height onto a solar array would leave a mark.

So solar isn't possible everywhere. Does that mean that no one should use it? Of course not. Perhaps non-solar home owners will buy power from others who have a surplus.

 

[Haf-E]

Sounds like the real issue fr California is "California's large projected population growth of more than 14 million new Californians by 2060, relative to the 2010 baseline of 37 million" - that is a growth of 38%.

All utilities have surplus power at times and EVs can charge from that - for example - late at night. For the majority of EVs it would only require about 3 hours of the charger running at 6kW to refill the battery after driving 50 miles that day. It also is possible for electric vehicles to operate as energy storage systems and be available to deliver energy back into the grid when the utility needs help.

The idea that the only solution to the energy challenges a place like California has is for the utility to put huge solar electric systems out in the middle of the desert and to then sell the electricity back to the customers hundreds to thousands of miles away is the kind of thinking that got them into that mess. There are many times the required space on non-shaded rooftops on warehouses and other commercial buildings or as shade structures in parking lots all over california which can be used for locating solar arrays - there is no need to use any of the "precious California land" for solar arrays.

As far as having shaded roofs on your house - that is a problem - but it is possible to "buy into" a community solar project that gets built on a school or other local facility and to have that credit applied to you utility bill. This is being done in WA state already.

Another factor to consider is that the production and transportation of fossil fuels uses a lot of energy as well - which is reduced or eliminated when using electric vehicles - that savings is not considered. The only maintenance required on most EVs is a tire rotation every 7500 miles - no oil changes, etc.

Also - with the increase is things like transit, ride sharing services (uber, lift) and car sharing services, not everyone will even own a car or drive one to work.

 

[Haf-E]

Haven wrote: "A Sugar Pine cone dropping from height onto a solar array would leave a mark."

You'd be surprised at how much of a impact a solar electric module can tolerate - the standard test required to pass is a 3 inch ball of ice projected at 85 miles per hour - what is referred to as the "hail impact" test.

 

[Rockhounder]

"Our new house in Big Bear is also a non starter, with the tall sugar pine and Jeffrey pines towering 80 feet up all around everybodies properties..."

A Sugar Pine cone dropping from height onto a solar array would leave a mark.

So solar isn't possible everywhere. Does that mean that no one should use it? Of course not. Perhaps non-solar home owners will buy power from others who have a surplus.

Yes, local communities, with shared solar would work, but to do that and have to run your own utility poles and wire from a project like that, we don't have the $30k/per mile to link up to someone elses grid. Luckily Big Bear power company is easy to work with, and still has a small town community attitude, but with their having to already buy power off the grid for 90% of homes here that can never have their own PV, due to the forest trees, it is nervous to say the least. If only there were streams around here to provide hydro, that would be ideal.

 

[Haf-E]

Yes, local communities, with shared solar would work, but to do that and have to run your own utility poles and wire from a project like that

No need to run separate wires from a project - it just feeds into the local grid connection and then accounting takes care of the credits/costs/profits being applied where they should be.

We have to stop thinking of the utility distribution and transmission systems as being owned by the utilities - they were allowed to develop it but it was paid for by the rate payers - they were allowed to operate as with a "guaranteed profitable monopoly" status in order to develop the power system and made plenty of profit doing it. The future may (or will) require a different utility model.

 

[Rockhounder]

No need to run separate wires from a project - it just feeds into the local grid connection and then accounting takes care of the credits/costs/profits being applied where they should be.

We have to stop thinking of the utility distribution and transmission systems as being owned by the utilities - they were allowed to develop it but it was paid for by the rate payers - they were allowed to operate as with a "guaranteed profitable monopoly" status in order to develop the power system and made plenty of profit doing it. The future may (or will) require a different utility model.

Problem is that to tie into the power grid to then use shared transmission, you also now have to pay prorated costs of the entire grid use and power supply. You cannot as an individual house use "your portion of a grid farm" that enters into the grid, if it is powering more than the end users. You are just given a "credit" to use when you are net taking power off the grid. It is totally rigged to profit the power companies which are granted by the state the authority to oversee the grid. Then, the addition of required regulatory permits and oversight costs ended up making it a lot more expensive than just using the current kw/h rates. It sucks. The only truly cost effective power gen would be to have a truly independent run of perhaps several contiguous property owners, pooling power off a centrally located (on one of their properties) PV array. We were not allowed to even apply for easement access of running power lines along lot edges without express property owners permission, and filing all the required engineering, and environmental impact studies, which starts at tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention, that unless you are a state regulated power company, you are never allowed to rum power across public roads or rights of way. So if you and your neighbors happen to have a county dirt access road even, crossing the proposed transmission route, you are S.O.L. It was a real mess when we looked into it. Could be done, but even with several nearby ranch owners interested, the overall cost was beyond ridiculous.

Our family owns some large acreage in Nevada, near Battle Mountain, and there, we have been designing a system for using PV and Wind, to power, and pumping water for ag purposes. We came up with a pretty neat system to pump water to the holding ponds on the high point of the property 80+ acres on east line of local mountain range. Then there will be an array of 4 mini hydro generators to use the water to generate in the times when there is no sun or wind. Pretty cool, and eliminated the need for a huge battery array that needs to be replaced every 7 years (for peak storage retention of amp/hrs)

 

[rayra]

Bigger trouble is battery construction. Takes a lot of effort to get the metals out of the ground. And some of them are in very limited supply.

 

[Rockhounder]

You sure there is not a decimal missing such as ".3 inch"
85mph ? A 3 inch blob of liquid water would be dangerous as hell, nevermind as a frozen solid.

Mythbusters showed something like that going through an airplane. To resist an impact, you'd need like a 1/4" lexan shield. I'd think. I do know that there are protective coverings over PV panels to shield from impact damage, but I don't think a 3-4 pound sugar pine cone falling from 80 feet up was in the minds of PV designers

 

[Rockhounder]

Bigger trouble is battery construction. Takes a lot of effort to get the metals out of the ground. And some of them are in very limited supply.

Many military analysts think that the next big wars will be fought over rare earth metals resource zones. There is currently a shortage, and the processing gets harder as ore yield rates lower, as the easy stuff is being currently mined. Kind of like gold mines, where the low hanging fruit is already mined out, and now they are looking at new mines that only produce hundreds of tons per ozt yields, yikes!

 

[Haf-E]

One difference with batteries is that the main material (lead, lithium etc) does not get "consumed" like with fossil fuels - the lead, lithium and even the plastic casing is recycled. The latest lithium-ion batteries are using significantly less amounts of lithium per kWh of storage - and that trend is expected to continue for a while.

 

[Rockhounder]

Now, if we could just perfect UHP storage for compressed metallic hydrogen, then that really WOULD be the white Swan of tech to power our globe in virtual perpetuity, with orbital solar collectors beaming down directed MW to collectors.

I am a huge fan of hard SF, and it's only a matter of time before more and more of those ideas become backed by real research money.

 

[Coachgeo]

Slightly off topic sorta..... but not..... The bigger expedition rigs in here are perfect for Locomotive EV..... as in a oil derivative fueled gen set (diesel or even sterling) charging probably a combination of a few battery banks and a bunch of capacitors that power high torque electric motors at the wheels. The torque of electric motors matches great with heavy vehicles.... that's why Trains use them. So...... no charging stations needed? Besides charging stations in the outback, desert or deep forest willll probabbbly be the last one's ever installed... right before armagedon

 

[Haf-E]

Makes me imagine jumping one of the behemoth expo rigs right off of a power with a giant set of jumper cable clamps....

I agree with the idea. Electric powered yatchs are happening already - expo rigs will follow soon.