I worry about the current trend of both France and Sweden shutting down nuclear plants without building any replacements though. Wind power is great, I suppose (the jury is still out on the sustainability of the hardware - but it's not looking great at the moment - massive amounts of concrete needed causing kinda huge co2 emissions during the chemical manufacturing processes), but it's no good as a baseline power for days when there's no wind and the hydro power is running on low. The fallback for that scenario is burning coal or oil.
Baseline power is less of an issue for EVs, since they a) have their own energy storage built in, and b) generally just run ~ 1 hour a day, making it pretty easy to come up with schemes to shift demand around.
Agree the trend of decommissioning nuclear plants is counterproductive for other reasons though.
> Baseline power is less of an issue for EVs, since they a) have their own energy storage built in, and b) generally just run ~ 1 hour a day, making it pretty easy to come up with schemes to shift demand around.
Is that really true when much of the employed population falls on a relatively uniform commute schedule?
I'd expect similar congestion to what's seen on roadways to recur on an inadequate power grid.
Yes it's still true. To charge an EV the average person needs around 10kWh a day, distributed over 23h of parking time. That's not a lot of current. You just need to teach the car to talk to the grid so that not all cars charge at once.
The median driving distance in the EU is 30 km. The electric cars on sale use 15-20 kWh per 100 km. Thus daily routine per median will be 5-7.5 kWh.
The current will be even less than the parent’s statement.
I recall a study that if 80% of cars were electric in the U.K., it will increase the load on the grid by 10-20%.
Cars are parked about 23h a day. Eventually most parking spots will also have a charger, because that's pretty much the only way EVs will be adopted in cities where people don't have garages.
I'm not sure how this looks WRT grid limits/congestion, but there's an alternative mass-adoption scenario where battery tech matures to the point of charge rates becoming equal or better than "gassing up" today.
We don't have gas pumps at every parking spot and drivers are generally content with the current situation.
Ah yes, that's of course also possible, but I think it's a lot less likely, because the shift to EVs needs to happen quite quickly, imho before batteries had time to improve sufficiently.
Most people in cities don't have cars at all. They use public transportation or ride sharing. Parking a car in a city is expensive, especially since you need to park it both at home and at your destination.
Cities are full of cars during the day, but the parking lots empty out at night. They live in less-dense suburbs, where it's comparatively easy to park and comparatively easy to have a charger installed. In the city, many of those who are willing to afford a car at all will also find ways to charge it (including sharing a few charging stations at their garage).
2. At least one but perhaps several orders of magnitudes more expensive than doing it at home. In part because you can charge overnight when pricing is the lowest.
I'd guess most people that have a EV-vehicle have a charger at home.
Both points are true today, but need not be true in the future. If everyone plugging in and charging at 20kW around 6pm becomes a problem (at it probably would be one), then the incentives will change.
Wind is dynamic generation - that means there is a likelihood within the system where there is a backup generation when wind is not blowing. I am not expert, but the way Grid works, you cannot simply pick the wind farm, you have to have a systems view of the wind farm and how its back-up (likely NG generator) interact as a whole and does wind blow during the high demand etc. Wind at right places is excellent but outside of those geographic areas its a dead end. Also, windy places tend to be farther from where the demand is and you have to include transmission related expenditure. I think 500 mile distance is more or less rule of thumb considered not good, economically or environmentally.
A metaphor if I may engage, is you cannot get a six pack with pure calorie counting, you have to have a bit more sophisticated system in nutrition and work outs for that. Same thing applies for The Grid, a wind mill of same specification at two different locations will give different yields, at different time of day and have completely different effect on system as a whole.
If the next-best alternative on point (c) was nuclear, nuclear is probably less polluting. But since nuclear is off the table, since people react really poorly to rare events that cause towns to be uninhabitable, the next-best for (c) is going to be natural gas or another fossil source. I'll take wind any day.
I read an essay talking about another field where the authors conclusions apply to nuclear vs wind and solar.
He participated in research on low cost rocket designs. His take away was the actual design wasn't as important as building more rockets rather than less.
With solar you make panels by the 100 million. Wind turbines by the tens of thousand. Nuclear by the low digits. Per year.
Even a smallish 2 kW car to grid capacity would give 80 GW of instantaneuous dispatchable power to the grid. And cars are distributed on all the territory.
If average battery is about 50 kWh that gives a whole day of France max demand.
And of course on the other way 80 GW of dispatchable demand.
For reference electro-nuclear production capacity is 62 GW in France.
A fully electric car fleet means the grid will just never go down.
How would car owners be compensated for the grid using their car’s battery? More wear and tear from more charge/discharge cycles, and the potential for the car to not be fully charged when the owner needs it?
That's the whole issue with grid and smart grid, what is the true price of electricity? :)
This is all software controlled, all new cars in Europe have a SIM card (eCall law), electric cars are computer on wheels, nothing is missing but the will to do it.
My Tesla model 3 SR+ has 50 kWh of NCA batteries with about 1000-1500 cycles, so about 600k km (to 70% of original capacity). Petrol car leave the european market with about 200-250k km on the odometer (source: discussion with a car journalist).
If you buy a Tesla model 3 SR+ right now in Europe it's made in China with LFP chemistry which is much more durable 3000-6000 cycles to about 2 millions km.
That gives plenty of room to play with car batteries without too much detriment.
And I assume you'll be able to limit discharging to some value to avoid getting stuck on your parking :).
In Ireland, eCall was only accepted on the condition that it only ever be used for ACR and no other purpose, so I don't think we'll see any EU standards using that eSim for charge control.
I don't think for example my Tesla model 3 has two distinct SIM one for eCall and another one for other data.
Do you have a link to Ireland law about eCall?
In Europe GDPR force to require consent for personnal data use like most car data is, once consent is given I see no reason not to use the already present SIM for eCall for other purposes.
I suppose you could get financial compensation (maybe in the form of cheaper power) if you hook your battery up. But I think the fact that your car battery might not have enough power when you need it is going to be a dealbreaker for many people.
I think if all parking infrastructure was equipped with “smart” charging equipment, then it wouldn’t be much of a problem, I don’t think.
In the future, theoretically, most cars will be electric, and if the current pattern of having a car parked 95% of the time holds true, then only a small percent of each car’s battery would be needed to balance the grid.
1x Hinkley Point C base, nameplate 3.2GW for 18,000 m3 [2]
I don't know how much Hinkley Point overall might use, because a lot might go into the shell, so say the overall build is an order of magnitude more than the base. That is 180k m3 of concrete or about 360 windmill foundations in Hinkley with some rather unfavourable assumptions. So a 3.2 GW nuclear reactor might match up to ~1.3 GW of Windfarm.
Depending on how much goes into the base vs the shell it is probably somewhere between 3x to an order of magnitude favouring nuclear. Not considering relative lifetime, although I expect a nuclear concrete pour has better long-term prospects (how would they replace the windmill without re-pouring the base?).
The whole world consumes massive amounts of concrete for all kinds of construction project. The energy industry is a tiny part of that.
We should definitely try and reduce the amount of embodied CO2 in wind turbines. But it is hardly a differentiating factor when comparing nuclear and wind. Both are fantastic in terms of co2 when compared to the fossil fuels they are replacing. We only talk about embodied co2 because the other emissions are
so non-existent!
Emissions from concrete are a problem which needs to be addressed separately to energy production. Other industries need to do their bit and provide alternatives.
Base load power generation is not something that you need, but it’s more of a description how to run an electric grid with slow power plants like nuclear or coal. With renewables you of course need a different strategy.
Hydro will be the backup power. With enough solar and wind generation there's no need for hydro to be on all the time. Hydroelectric dams are the biggest energy storage facilities we have.
Hydro can't scale up to the extent of gas without causing massive floods and other havoc downstream. Batteries can probably help a lot for peak shaving but I think in the medium term is mostly going to displace SSGTs more than anything else.
Wind generated about a quarter of German electricity in 2019, but there seems to be growing public resistance to new onshore farms and growth has fallen dramatically.
The article below gives a reasonable overview of the causes:
But I was responding to another argument: the parent claimed that wind power is actually removed. Except for some fear mongering that it might happen in the future I can't find any evidence for this. So still waiting on a citation on that original claim.
Thank you for this comment, underlining the advantage of nuclear versus renewables is a hard fight and I don't read that kind of comment very often.
Renewables clearly have no place when it comes to generate a lot of energy. They're interesting in a few cases where there's a lot of wind, or where there is no power grid and you need a little power.
Others advocate reducing energy consumption, but if we reduce co2 emissions from transport, we will need more electricity.
This is not 19.2% of all cars on the road but 19.2% of December sales, which is still amazing. I thought for a moment it was 20% of all cars which would be super cool and amazing. That is not that is not the intent of the headline but just clarifying :)
Worth noting that the top three cars are all new in 2020 (in the Zoe's case a major improvement on the existing model, in the other two cases brand new). I suspect a big part of it is that electric cars that people actually want have finally arrived.
If you can find me a new EV for €6k that goes up to 90km/h with 150km range (any weather, reliably, and for at least ~5 years), please let me know I'll come pick it up today and pay cash.
Last I checked, everything is north of twice that amount unless you omit the battery. I'd be willing to pay more for something amazing like an Aptera, though not super much because I'd simply not get enough use out of it: it won't ever beat taking mass transport to work, also because on mass transport I can relax before/after work instead of driving, so it will only ever be for weekend trips to my (girlfriend's) parents, grocery trips, etc. That's also why 45km/h electric cars or scooters are not worth it, they'd just replace local trips which I mostly do by bus anyway.
I'd also be happy with second-hand, but I have no idea about maintenance costs as I never owned any vehicle other than bikes. (I do have a driver's license and regular driving experience, it's just that I borrow what I'm driving.)
Any improvement in this number is nice, but remember that EVs would have to be 100% of the market for 12 years before they were a majority of vehicles on the road.
>but remember that EVs would have to be 100% of the market for 12 years before they were a majority of vehicles on the road.
Are you assuming a fixed rate of retirement for ICE vehicles? I've long wondered if the growth line of EVs would end up being yet another example of an S-curve rather than linear as so many seem to expect. It definitely seems like there are potential tipping point factors on both sides of the equation, because fossil fuel infrastructure has a ton of capex and opex that works due to massive amortization across a big enough fleet. And simultaneously justification for huge EV infrastructure investments, and the mass manufacturing necessary to keep prices marching down, faces some level of bootstrapping and amortization issues too. Plus, lack itself is a hindrance if people aren't confident about charging up.
But it's easy to see how that could flip, and then in a surprising hurry go in reverse. At some level of shrinking ICE usage a lot of gas stations themselves become non-viable. And then suddenly it starts to get harder to fuel up, in turn driving the dynamic even faster right? It seems probable that there will be some inertia due to lagging specialized applications, demand amongst niches like collectors, etc for a while. But it seems possible the new equilibrium might get reached non-linearly. And that's ignoring and political tipping points that could happen too, if a majority of people have EVs, or even a very sizable minority (say 20-40%), what happens to political support for current extensive systems of explicit and implicit subsidies fossil fuels enjoy?
Yes. There are communities where their fuel station isn't commercially viable but it's propped up because without it the community dies. They own their fuel station (often built by a chain or local owner which went out of business because it doesn't make commercial sense), a local is paid to run it, they buy fuel from a smaller supplier that doesn't have its own chain and then they retail it at either a modest loss or zero profit - because without fuel some residents would leave and having left they won't be replaced. I can see some of those communities deciding we'll go electric and divert the funding that keeps the fuel station alive to other things that help our community and have a future.
> Are you assuming a fixed rate of retirement for ICE vehicles?
Yes, that calculation assumes that, but it doesn't matter that much - if we take your alternative into account, either EVs have to be 100% of new cars for 12 years, or there has to be a big increase in new cars sold, which would be news in itself.
Or some less likely alternatives, like a huge mode switch to public transport or a global pandemic causing a mode switch to working from home or something.
>or there has to be a big increase in new cars sold, which would be news in itself.
Sure, but seems feasible. I mean upfront, 10-year horizons during disruptive shifts absolutely can get a bit speculative. I don't mean to make any hard predictions here. But there certainly seems to be a ton of capital floating around right now that could get redirected given the right incentives. Privately, there seem to be a significant number of people who could buy new cars but aren't. Cars seem to last significantly longer these days [0, 1], and the burgeoning of EVs may itself act as a further deterrent. If minimum capex and TCO made major shifts, I could see that driving significantly faster replacement cycles temporarily until new market equilibrium and saturation was reached. Granted with some floors created by segments of the population who couldn't handle the capex even if the opex was favorable as is so often the case.
But speaking of that there is the public side too. From what I can tell, a LOT of money continues to go into government subsidies of fossil fuels [2]. The politics will absolutely shift as the population shifts, and at some point it seems likely that "why not put those tens of billions into 'cash for clunkers' type schemes instead?" is going to make it one or another platform. Or all the platforms competing with each other. Of course that applies only to certain countries that can afford it.
I agree with your general point but on the gas stations I don't think it holds. Gas stations will keep serving gas as long as there's even some vague demand for it, so they would start disappearing rather at the end point of such an s-curve, than at the beginning.
And they'll still be around, they'll just serve electricity. Fun fact, a lot of gas stations used to serve as stables. When cars arrived, they served both and gradually stopped being stables.
Though with electricity being overall so much easier to distribute than gas, I'm guessing a significant amount will indeed have to close, especially inside cities; no point going to a refueling station if a charger is available at nearly every corner, when you're parked while eating at the restaurant, or when you're home asleep and charging from your garage.
In terms of emissions it’s far less than that as older cars are driven dramatically less on average. The average male driver in the US travels 16,550 miles a year. That hits 400k miles in just 24 years, meanwhile it’s somewhat unusual for cars to break 300k miles.
Instead, family members that drive less tend to have older cars.
As for petrol vehicules I assume once passed a certain level of EV they will become harder to fuel and maintain because petrol vehicule services will no longer be profitable and will disappear.
Meanwhile the backwards state of Wisconsin has a special extra tax for hybrid vehicles, and then an even larger extra tax for electric vehicles [1]. The justification was that hybrids don't pay their "fair share" of fuel taxes - but it's not like I see the state government putting a huge tax on diesel fuel to tax the heavy trucks that actually are causing road wear. [2]
Road maintenance has to be funded, and will be done in a way that avoids change and angering people who actually care (when change becomes necessary) while being at least a hypothetically good faith effort at fairness. So you shouldn't expect to get tolls (people who drive a lot will care more, plus wealthy suburbanites are more likely to fight this) or weight-based registration (no one drives more than truckers...)
So "hey, those guys stopped paying their share" can be passed,and that's what happens.
Oregon is doing the same too, but based on fuel economy. It's ridiculous that someone with a gas guzzler will pay less. It's the wrong move to transition us to alternative fuels.
That only sounds ridiculous if you don’t realize that fuel is being taxed to pay for roads and not for its externalities.
Up until the last 10 years, it wasn’t feasible to use the road with a heavy vehicle without burning fuel so it was a shortcut to put road tax on the fuel instead of tolls everywhere.
This is why farmers use red dyed diesel that has the tax excluded. They are still emitting just as much but aren’t wearing down the road.
Money is fungible. Don't confuse a narrative/explanation with actual use of funds. Cars cause a lot of externalities and likely the tax is still too low, but it would be naive to think the funds collected one way are exactly used for an earmarked purpose.
Trucks pay a lot of taxes, both in fuel and otherwise. True everyone who uses diesel pays those fuel taxes, but the number of diesel passenger cars in the USA is so small that it can be ignored.
In 2016 commercial trucks paid $18.4 billion in federal highway user taxes and $21.6 billion in state highway user taxes[1]
Commercial trucks may be paying more taxes nominally but they are not paying for the road wear that they cause. A commercial long-hauler causes 1,408 times more damage than a passenger vehicle. Even something like a garbage truck is 1,279x worse [1].
What can’t be ignored is the level of subsidies being offered to heavy vehicles.
Not that I'm anti-EV, but it's probably worth noting that EVs like Tesla's are both heavier and more torquey than the average ICE econobox. They might be causing more than their fair share of road wear. Especially considering you can treat every stop as a drag race in relative silence.
If you want to EV tax me for road wear fine. Please tax trucks at least 1000x, and please tax all gas burning cars for the lung cancer and other negative externalities they cause.
> Would take 10000 Tesla’s to wear the road the same as one truck.
Did you consider the weight for the full vehicle, or per-axle? The per-axle figure is the relevant one and would probably flatten that figure out quite a bit.
They are also much more stringently enforced on commercial transportation vehicles, which require annual inspections and serious preventative maintenance to pass which does already add to the cost of operating these vehicles.
Their per-mile consumption is higher as well, which aside from being bad for the environment, already means they are consuming much more fuel and paying a higher tax as it is.
> tax all gas burning cars for the lung cancer and other negative externalities they cause.
Transportation, on the whole, accounts for 28% of greenhouse gasses... but it also enables the society that we live in and our own personal mobility within it. Electricity is nearly the same at 27%. You can shift the source, but you cant eliminate greenhouse gas from our way of life.
Yeah trucks are subsidized because without them most populated areas wouldn't have food, and people tend to like food.
Also basically every every other material good.
I think people would probably scream pretty loud if food suddenly jumped in price 10x, but maybe we could handle it like most places handle sales tax? Exempt trucks carrying food/necessities and tax everything else.
> Yeah trucks are subsidized because without them most populated areas wouldn't have food, and people tend to like food.
The cost of transportation should just be included in the good. That way, if someone comes up with an ingenious new method of urban farming or something, they'll get rewarded in the market for cost savings.
Note on the weight comparison: AWD EV do have two or more motors (I've not seen models with only one motor but may be I missed one). AWD petrol cars only have one motor, just more transmission axes/gearboxes, so little impact on weight.
AWD model 3 does have a 50% bigger battery though.
If you want to tax according to wear, almost every car is pretty much free and trucks become insanely expensive. Road wear is something like axle weight to the fourth power.
At least here, those tiny cars are also the ones running studded tires in Portland when we rarely get snow let alone ice where studs are needed. That absolutely is destroying our roads but we don't seem to care to tax them more.
Speaking from Amsterdam, as I just moved here, many streets have electric charge stations. Each charge stations can charge up to three vehicles at once and you just hook up your cable. Exact details I don’t know, but thought it is a lot more apparen from what I saw in Seattle.
Edit - Again, not sure if France is anything similar, but I have found it super interesting.
Wow, at that rate of increase, even if it were just linear (and these things tend not to be), they would be at virtually 100% new car sales EV in 6 years.
Not that I'm predicting that would actually happen, just saying that's an enormous rate of increase in 12 months.
They're certainly working on it. At Battery day elon confirmed a smaller, mass-market affordable car.
He has also said many times a vehicle will be designed in China for the Chinese market, and a vehicle will be designed in Germany for the European market.
It's coming, but it all takes time, and they needed to focus on the high dollar products with high(er) margins so they could finance the lower ones.
Serious question regarding your 3rd paragraph: Why? Doesn't Tesla have essentially unlimited access to capital? Why don't they just raise some massive amount of money, borrow more, and do everything right now?
They should probably buy a struggling automaker (Nissan, etc) for access to supply chains and raw amounts of automotive engineers. Nissan should have substantive numbers of EV engineers too.
At a minimum that would enable working on a minivan, smaller cars, and other form factors, especially if it is under a different badge.
But that assumes that car design is the bottleneck, it may still be battery supply, and nothing matters until that is solved.
Given their apparent quality problems, I'd guess it's not all battery issues.
Nissan is effectively owned by Renault (43%) and is also multiple times larger than Tesla.
The price of acquisition would likely exceed anything Tesla could scrape together right now.
Then there's also the problem that Nissan is fundamentally a Japanese company. You can't just "acquire-hire" people halfway around the globe and expect that to work out.
They might be able to buy part (maybe whatever they own in the west, if there's anything worthwhile) of Nissan though, assuming someone was selling.
And don't forget the American culture of owning huge fuel wasters and being proud of their expensive purchase. Long distances in countries like Australia and the USA sound like legitimate reasons for ICE vehicles, but the more cynical side of me assumes that USA culture leaking into Australia is at least equally likely.
Nuclear has very high levelized cost of energy, but consumer electricity prices are quite far removed from those numbers. You can't compare consumer prices to learn anything about the relative costs of power production, because 90% of the price difference is because of different legislation. See e.g. here [1] for a comparison of different power sources.
I'm a major LFTR fan/stan, but new nuclear projects aren't a good idea with the cost curves for wind/solar generation and battery storage dropping 10% per year at a minimum.
Over the 5-10 years of a major nuke project planning and construction, they're going to see their target cost undercut by wind/solar by massive margins.
Obviously those curves won't last forever, once they stabilize, then new nuke projects will have a more stable target.
I think SMRs like nuscale have a pretty good chance at the same as long as the myriad of startups can consolidate a little and not crowd each other out of the consistent volumes required to advance on the learning curve. It seems right now the medium term future of the industry largely wrests on the economic success of the nuscale ecosystem.
I'd happily pay today's prices if that means we can stop worrying whether we'll find enough physical space. We still need to fill as much as we can find, but we're not bound by it.
The USA has it easy so to speak. Higher density countries, especially if they don't want to fill literally their whole share of the sea with wind (which is also much more expensive than on land), if they have any sea to begin with... e.g. I heard that southeastern Germany has much less wind because they have a higher minimum distance between villages and wind turbines, but I don't remember where I read that (whether they have less wind installed was a quicker check[2], omw to bed since it's 5am here). They already can't find space to put them and green energy is only at like 5% of their energy need (33% of the electricity[3], which is 15% of the energy need[4]). In fact, if you look at the graph of [3], renewables are so far mostly replacing nuclear production and fossil fuels are still going strong.
This just isn't the time to phase fission out, yet, regardless of whether anyone is in favor of building it out.
I just think it's silly to exclude many many megawatts of the safest kind of green energy. We're barely scratching the surface of replacing power generation, let alone the other ~90% of fossil fuel usage (e.g. in the Netherlands, 112TWh is electricity versus 900TWh total fossil fuel usage per year[1]).
It's like deciding not to bring more oxygen to the international space station, hoping you'll be able to find enough room to grow plants instead. Just that the experiment we're doing is on the scale of a planet and decades ahead with a notoriously hard to predict future. I say we should start building today and, as soon as we then can, turn off the fossil fuel based power plants, replace the lion's share of combustion engine cars, etc. that contribute to killing or impairing millions of people every year[5], rather than (to use the previous comparison) worrying whether oxygen production by vegetation might be cheaper than lifting up some more oxygen. "Will it keep us going strong" is perhaps a better question than "what's the cheapest option that will make it look like we're making good progress to the majority of our voters?"
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution "air pollution causes the deaths of around 7 million people worldwide each year, and is the world's largest single environmental health risk"
the real game changer is renault making the dacia spring in '21 for 15k (that will cost around 10keuros after state giving back 6k) this can make EV price competitive VS fuel
In the Netherlands if you want to get a parking permit and have an EV you get put to the top of the list. Petrol and diesel cars have to wait months and months.
Seems to be working pretty well.
From what I can see I'd say public sector impact on EV sale is insignificant (36k just in december).
Also in France about half of sales are to fleet buyers, and those were up to now quite conservative and buying very little electric vehicules. I assume this will start to change soon.
> The December combined plugin share of 19.2% was dominated by battery electric vehicles (BEVs) at 11.1% of the total auto market, with plugin hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) taking 8.1%.
The article also has a chart showing the breakdown.[1]
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Sweden in November: 38.7%, up 2.7x YoY
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/02/swedens-ev-sales-hit-ne...
I worry about the current trend of both France and Sweden shutting down nuclear plants without building any replacements though. Wind power is great, I suppose (the jury is still out on the sustainability of the hardware - but it's not looking great at the moment - massive amounts of concrete needed causing kinda huge co2 emissions during the chemical manufacturing processes), but it's no good as a baseline power for days when there's no wind and the hydro power is running on low. The fallback for that scenario is burning coal or oil.