I understand why the author has decided to use this model for vehicle use, as it has one very strong attribute: it is how nearly all of us presently use ICE vehicles.

But I do not believe that this model would reflect how people would use electric vehicles, or how they would be adopted into the national fleet. I think that EV adoption would more likely follow the path that most Prius owners (like myself) have used. Using this model dramatically alter the landscape, both for electrical use and for planning purposes, from what the author has proposed.

To draw from my personal experience, since this model has roughly the same attribute as the author’s (it is presently in use by a suburban dwelling American) and shares the virtue of actually being used, I suspect that EV usage would follow this path:

1) The EV would replace one of the family’s vehicles, or would be a temporary augmentation to the vehicle fleet. In my family, we replaced a ten year old four passenger compact car, getting roughly 25mpg, with the Prius. Prior to the Prius, we drove the compact about 8,000 miles per year, and the family station wagon (15mpg) about 12,000 per year. Of those 20,000 total vehicle miles, perhaps as much as 5,000 were for trips longer than 40 miles. Total gasoline usage: about 1100 gallons.

2) After the Prius, the mileage allotment shifted; the station wagon was driven less than 6,000 miles a year, and the Prius was driven about 12,000. Total gasoline usage has dropped now to about 650 gallons per year.

3) Add in an EV: since the station wagon now has little resale value (like hundreds of thousands of SUV’s), our EV would be an addition to our vehicle fleet, not a replacement. The EV would be a two seater, useful for commuting and for dates. Longer trips, or more passengers, and I would use the Prius. Larger loads across town, I use the paid for station wagon (or would purchase an old junker SUV/pickup truck).

4) Now, I would expect that the annual mileage on the station wagon would drop to less than 1,000 (hauling wood, etc.), the Prius would probably drop to about 9,000 miles, and the EV would replace about 5,000 miles of station wagon usage and 3,000 of Prius usage: ie, those times when both parents have to be mobile, and two cars are needed. Gasoline consumption would then drop to about 275 gallons per year.

5) Assuming 8,000 miles on the EV, at 5 miles (8km) per kWh: 1,600 kWh annually, or five 80 watt solar panels on my roof. I feed my solar kWh into the grid during the day at peak times, pull off my 5kWh at night from the load usage. I also install CFL’s, insulate, and put in a geothermal HVAC to replace my electric system. My annual electric consumption (including my EV) has gone from nearly 9,000 kWh to about 5,000 kWh, with nearly 2,000 kWh coming from my rooftop.

6) Bingo: my total yearly fossil fuel energy usage from paragraph 1 to paragraph scenario 1 to paragraph 5 has dropped by over 800 gallons of gasoline and 6,000 kWh. At $3/gallon and $0.12/kWh (all USD), my annual savings in fuel alone is about $3,300. The total cost to my family for the EV, the solar, and the geothermal is about $55,000. After my US tax credits, that drops to about $45,000; amortized over ten years at 5%, that is about $370/month (after my mortgage tax deduction), or $4,500 year. No change needed to my electric grid; my total electric usage has dropped, even without the solar.

THIS is my hybrid system of transport: ICE, Hybrid, and Electric. All needs met, consumption reduced, with the bonus of there always being a car in the driveway, looking like someone is home.

MarkM - while I agree entirely with you regarding hobbies, let it be noted that growing food for those of you in cities out in teh countryside is not a "lifestyle choice" nor a nuisance. You'd miss it if it went away, trust me.

Sharon Astyk

There is a difference of course between "need to drive" and "want to drive." Many, if not most people, on daily errands could get where they wanted to go, and do what they wanted to do, by means other than an ICE, if they had foresight and planning. Using a ICE vehicle is really a matter of convenience. A mile to the grocery store is an easy bike ride, once you start doing it, and takes adds only about ten minutes to thirty to forty minute trip. You just have to have a maintained bike, a helmet, a bike lane and the will to do it. Americans don't generally do that, so we will have some lifestyle changes.

That's not how V2G would work, but nice Hyperbole.

Your car or your home's grid-inverter/charger system would SELL available power, based on your preset Buy/Sell conditions, and would not sell past the State-of-Charge that you had determined (programmed) in to allow you to get your morning or day's drive completed. You could probably even program in a 'Sick Day Rate', so when the electricity is paying really well, that you'd run your battery down in 'sell mode' and call in sick.

..and yes, it would require a LOT of vehicles operating this way to make much of a dent in the Grid's stability.. but you could devise this pricing system so that it would be worth it for individual car owners to do it, so that the build-out can commence. It shouldn't even require a 'SmartGrid' to work, since the pricing and local demand info could be available to the Charger/Inverter via the web at this point.

Daft idea.

When I get into my car in the morning to commute to work, I really don't want to see that the battery is flat because there hasn't been much wind.

Straw-man criticism of the idea.

When you get in your car in the morning, you don't care if it was charged from 8 PM to midnight or 3 AM to 7; you only care that it's charged.  The utility (or an aggregator) would take the data from all the cars plugged in, calculate how many megawatt-hours are needed to charge them, look at the list of powerplants on-line and the forecast for RE production, and figure out which plants to run and how to shape the charging curve over the next 12 hours or so.

The utility would love this.  Big powerplants change their output only slowly, and matching instantaneous load can be a hassle; if they only have to meet (a) X megawatt-hr overnight, and (b) generator output roughly matched to load when the cars start unplugging, the job is far easier.  Instead of jiggering plant output on a scale of minutes, they blip chargers up and down a bit.

You would not need a huge fleet to get useful results.  A mere 1000 vehicles with 220 V 30 A connections is 6.6 megawatts, which is a substantial part of the jitter in the local grid's demand.  100k vehicles is 660 MW, the size of a major powerplant.  Average US consumption is about 460 GW, while the vehicle population is over 200 million; if even 5% of the fleet was EVs, the instantaneous power capacity would be 660 GW.  Matching instantaneous demand to generation would be a snap.

It's so daft that a bunch of Silicon Valley companies are working on it, including Google.

"V2G Demonstration at Google with PG&E: RechargeIT is also exploring ways to develop and deploy V2G technology. With the help of PG&E, Google will be demonstrating how electricity might be transmitted back and forth between plug-in hybrids and the grid. V2G offers the potential to use plug-in hybrids as a battery storage to make better use of our energy and stabilize the grid. Similar to the plug-in hybrid vehicle demonstration, the objective is to collect real world data to understand the benefits of V2G and enable future adoption."

PG&E is the local utility, quite accustomed to offering demand response programs.

People are building smart charging stations which don't yet do V2G, as far as I know, but certainly will sooner or later.

Companies like Applied Materaials are covering parking lots with solar cells, a triple win:

a) Electricity.
b) Cars stay cooler.
c) Asphalt stays cooler, which reduced the Urban Heat Island effect, which reduces air conditioning load.

Of course, the solar/electric car connection fits some geographies and not others.

====
"There are many countries and regions pursuing electric car technology, including Israel, Denmark, Portugal, Germany, Ireland, and California. Most of these countries..."
was an amusing start to the article, given that CA does act like a country on occasion :-)

It would mostly be to bridge expensive (~25c/kWh) peak power. The idea is that you charge up at night for ~5c/kWh, at $350/kWh and a PHEV like the volt, storage costs are around $10c/kWh, so by paying you 20c/kWh the electric co can save ~5c/kWh and you can make ~5c/kWh. As usual YMMV, and we shouldn't sign anything we don't understand! ;)

Batteries are expensive and have a limited number of charge and discharge cycles. I doubt the utility will reimburse you for the loss of battery life from discharging your battery.

AC Propulsion's V2G grid regulation test found that the capacity of the (2-yr old Panasonic lead-acid) battery pack increased over the life of the test.

Many batteries have limited calendar life; if you don't use the available cycles, they die anyway.  While certain kinds of operation are not consistent with maximum battery life, certain types of V2G are all but certain to be worthwhile.

Some people(Australia, parts of the US) generate almost all of their electricity from coal so for them electric cars are worse. If you get your power from coal at 1050 grams CO2 per kwh then electric cars are more polluting assuming you use same fuel efficient gasoline cars (in the Dutch example ~37 mpg) which was 150 g/km. For example, charging electric cars
from the grid is 75% efficient(Bossel), so 1050 grams/kwh x .125 kwh/km / 75% = 175 grams per kilometer > 150 grams/ kilometer in Holland.

An alternative would be to water-shift coal to hydrogen gas and bury the CO2. Water-shifting (including CCS) a ton of bituminous coal can produce 120 GGE of H2 gas if compression(to ~2000 psi per Bossel) energy is included.
A fuel cell car(Honda FCV) gets 100 kilometers per GGE so that's 12000 kilometers per ton of coal.
(By contrast hydrogen from electrolysis you'd get ~ 90 GGE per ton of bituminous coal.)

See case 3 below.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/hydrogen_clean_fuels/refshelf/pubs/...

This is the same as a car on electricity from a ton of coal;
75% of 2000 kwh per ton x 8 kilometers per kwh= 12000 kilometers per ton of coal.

Given the fact that Holland will become a net importer of natural gas in 20 years is the switch to electric cars a good idea? World supplies of natural gas will probably run out in about 50 years at current consumption rates while coal will last 3 times as long at current consumption rates.

I am not imaginary. I live on a dirt road and do haul firewood among other things. I do admit however that my trips in the truck (loaded or I'd have the car) are normally 60km or less.

BTW if the average daily drive is 40 km, you need to fudge factor for all the days of no driving
so at least 60 km, better 80 between charges.

Kiashu,
Thanks for the excellent links and dispelling myth "its OK for small countries in EU, but US( or Australia) are large countries"

Electric or PHEV are part of the solution to declining liquid fuels, it are not the direct solution to GHG emissions.
Since all low carbon energy produces electricity, replacing oil for transport by electricity, is an essential step in replacing all FF energy by low carbon energy.

We won't need to replace anything every few years with current tech. Testing shows minimal loss in capacity/range over 180,000 miles. Granted, a lead acid powered EV may need to have the pack replaced every few years, but most production EVs won't be powered by LA. Capacity loss is only about 1.3% per year at 140F, so probably less in most applications outside of a car sitting in Death Valley, which does reduce capacity/range, but not by enough to make replacement in three years a reality. Maybe in around 10-20 years if the owner can't deal with 80% of the original capacity/range, but that's a ways away from every few years.

Along with the price of oil, we'll also see the price of electricity, and batteries, and tires, and road maintenance (and food) rise too.

110,000$ for a 2 passenger car with 230 miles per charge and a battery that (supposedly) lasts 5 years and will cost $$$$ to replace?! Thats not solving the energy/ transportation problem - seems more like eco-hype for a handful of super rich.

1. I didnt ask about cars fluffy. I have owned several cars and know all the costs involved. So you answer doesnt really answer my question. You have any practical examples? The battery for the Tesla (quoted above) lasts (supposedly) 5 years? Whats the cost for replacing it? Any idea? Assuming the 110,000$ price tag isnt going for gold steering wheel my guess a big chunk of dough is for that battery.

3 & 6. Nuclear energy is no short term or even long term solution, according to most consensus its a very risky cushion.

7. In residential use the more energy you use the more you pay. Perhaps some industry gets better deals but thats probably for various grand reasons (economy, jobs, etc) so if I was going to hook up my electric car in some industrial drive in plug& go setting I guess they wouldnt do that for free, would they?

8. What information is your position based on? Are batteries made from abundant, easy to find, renewable sources?

2/4/5?

Thanks Bob! I have come across this before and actually theres an e-mail going around with a power point presentation about alleged conspiracies behind the destructions of veriious EV's. I dont know what to make of all that really.

All I have to say is if it was that succesful why was it destroyed? Your link points out that there are some used RAV EV's for sale but we are talking about a handfull and with prices like $50-60,000. Add the cost for a PV system and what about them batteries, cost and replacement?

Sorry, got my GW and MW mixed up! How embarrassing! The point was total Netherlands generating capacity was 21.5GW (2004 figures) . So the point I was after is that it would take an increase of anywhere between 5% (at 8 km per KWh charging for 8hrs) and 25% (1.6 km per KWh charging for 8hrs) on 2004 installed capacity to power 1 million vehicles.

Apologies for the crap error - almost solved the worlds energy problem there!

L,
Sid.

By some analyses, we could get at least half of our current fleet onto the electric grid without needing to build any more generating capacity or grid carrying capacity (on average; some regions are different). This is because most of them would be charging during what are now off-peak hours (at night).

We wouldn't need to build any more power stations, but we'd need to put more fuel through them. So if we stuck with our current mix across most of the West, of mostly coal and some gas generation, then we'd burn more coal and natural gas.

As I said elsewhere in the thread, it just moves the emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack, not really an improvement for us. Puts off peak oil a bit, brings peak coal and gas closer. Better? I dunno, probably not.

Of course if we were to replace our current coal and gas-fired generation with renewables, then that's something different. But we seem reluctant to do that; we build renewables on top of fossil fuel burning, not instead of it. If we have 1,000GW of coal and gas and then build 400GW of wind and solar, we don't shut down 400GW of coal and gas, we just say, "look, we're 400/1,400 = 29% renewable, aren't we awesome?" Yet we're burning as much stuff as before...

So really these issues of how we transport ourselves and how we get electricity, they're paired issues and we have to look at them together. Or we just move burning up of depleting resources and their emissions from one place to another.

Australia will reduce the very high carbon intensity of electricity IF we meet the 20%renewable electricity target, and new FF plants use NG instead of coal, but will still be 65-70% from coal!

As I said upthread, the danger is that we'll just add renewables to the grid rather than having them replace fossil fuels. So the renewables % goes up, but we're still burning a heap of stuff.

In the island nation of MadeUp, they have a coal plant with a 1,000GWh capacity burning coal and putting out 1,200 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. MadeUp's Energy Minister gets someone to build 200GWh of wind and 200GWh of solar, and proudly announces that the country is now 400/1,400 = 29% renewable.

Yet the coal is still being burned, and there are still 1,200 million tonnes of CO₂ being pumped into the air. The "carbon intensity" of the energy has dropped - but they're still pumping as much CO₂ out there as before. So in that respect, the "carbon intensity" or renewables percentage doesn't mean much. What matters is total emissions, and total consumption of fossil fuels.

What they need to do is when the 400GWh of renewables are ready, shut down some of the coal station's boilers - say, 400GWh of them. Then CO₂ emissions drop from 1,200Mt to 720Mt, and people have as much electricity as before.

This issue of renewables adding to rather than substituting in the grid is a real problem. We've seen something similar in Sweden - in the 1980s they voted to get rid of their nuclear reactors, and so they built lots of renewables, but... kept the nuclear reactors going, and are now considering building more. I don't see why it wouldn't happen with fossil fuel plants, too - in all the talk of Australia having renewables targets, I hear nothing about our shutting down our fossil fuel plants. We're going to add, not substitute.

Natural gas emissions, as I noted upthread, are typically understated by about 30%. This still makes gas better than coal, but not as nice as many people think.

However, we have two problems. The first is that the climate does not distinguish between a tonne of carbon dioxide from burning gas and a tonne from burning coal, or poo, or making concrete, or cow farts, or whatever. What matters is the total amount. If gas produces half the emissions of coal but we consume twice as much electricity as today, then we're stuck in the same place.

Secondly, it's often forgotten, even at TheOilDrum, that coal and gas like oil are finite. It's senseless to substitute one declining resource for another. It's playing a shell game with our problems.

If we all build lots of natural gas-burning generation then the natural gas peak will be brought closer, and after that what will the plants burn? A power plant has a life of about 40 years. If we expand natural gas burning for electricity, we could replace most of our coal-fired plants worldwide over the next decade - building them 2009-2019. So they get shut down 2049-2059.

Are you willing to bet that we won't see peak gas until after the 2050s? It's thought by some that it'll peak around 2020 [source], but of course if we consume more it'll peak sooner. Why build a power plant that won't have a reliable source of fuel for its lifetime?

If we go into producing electricity with natural gas and find that it peaks, becomes more expensive and declines in availability over the the next decade or two, I think you'll find that it'll be very tempting to turn those coal-fired plants back on. Those turbines and boilers will come out of mothballs.

Basically we just have to give up on the idea of doing everything by burning fossil fuels. Whether it's oil or coal or gas is just a cosmetic question. We use less coal and oil and more gas and we bring the gas peak closer. We use coal to make gas and bring the coal peak closer. We use gas to get oil from tarsands and bring the gas peak closer. We use CNG to power vehicles and bring the gas peak closer.

It's a game of musical chairs, using one depleting resource to substitute for another. The only question is who'll be left standing at the end.

Even if burning coal gave us vitamin C and we could bury it forever and effectively and cheaply and burning gas made pretty girls smile, we should still give up on them because once you burn fossil fuels, they're gone forever; so at some point we won't have them to burn, and will have to learn to live without them.

Eventually fossil fuels are going to run short and we'll have to learn to live without them. We may as well start now.

I said,

"if we did not consume fossil fuels at all, there'd be no need to flare, so that flaring emissions must be added to our energy emissions."

Whether the gas is flared from a gas site or oil site is irrelevant. If we did not consume oil, there'd be no flaring in Nigerian oil fields, would there? Coal seam gas, oil field flaring, use of gas to get oil from tar sands - fossil fuels are all connected, if you burn one you end up burning another, too.

Certainly I could do things differently as an individual. But we're talking here about the impact across a whole society. And if all we do is bring in electric cars and change nothing else, we'll continue to find that few people buy renewable energy, and even fewer put in solar panels.

It's as I said, transport and the energy sector are paired issues, we have to consider and deal with them together.

Roughly speaking, building a car is ten times as much work as building the electrical infrastructure to support it. There's no reason to assume that electrical infrastructure would not keep pace.

The lengths you go to to disprove someone's idea knows no bounds. The notion that you can compare "work" building a car with work for "bespoke" infrastructure projects is utterly ludicrous, to the point I have had to read your comment a few times in order to take in what you said. The figure you quote is 10 times, how on earth can you concoct such a figure based on a subjective quantity?

To build a car you need to spend a billion pounds to design and "tool" up. Once this has been done, making cars is little work at all, that why they fall of the production line every couple of minutes. Each car you make is "cheaper" than the previous one, as the initial capital cost gets distributed.

Providing charging points around the country (unless you go camping or caravaning) is a major undertaking, which will require planning approval, risk assessments galore, major civil works etc etc. I do not know any where at the moment in the uk where I can charge a car either at destiny or en route. I use "park and ride" facilities frequently, train station carparks regularly, no charging point anywhere close.

Even large numbers of electric cars would use relatively small amounts of power.

For simplicity, assume that all cars become electric. In Australia we have 14.4 million registered vehicles in 7.6 million households, or 1.9 vehicles per household.

The EV model given in the article consumes 1khWh/8km, and as I said upthread, in Australia driving amounts to 40km/day for each vehicle. So that each such vehicle would require some 5kWh/day of electricity. Of course some vehicles are motorcycles and others are trucks, but 5kWh/day per vehicle seems like it'd be a fair if low figure for an average.

5kWh/day for 1.9 vehicles is 9.5kWh/day per household. By comparison, Australian households consumed in 2005 some 8,200kWh of electricity per year each, or 22kWh/day. So if all the vehicles were electric, this would mean that the residential sector would be increasing its energy consumption by about half.

A few weeks ago my state had a 40C plus heatwave, and residential electricity consumption increase by half. The state had blackouts. The power generation capacity existed, but the transformers and so on couldn't handle it. The things have to cool down, normally they let them cool in the low-demand periods, but suddenly there were no low-demand periods and they overheated and blew up. If we charged cars up, when would we do it? Late at night, normally a low-demand period. It'd be the same thing.

So my own state's power generation could handle the extra demand from electric vehicles, but the grid couldn't handle it. We could of course improve the grid. However, I am not hopeful of this happening.

That's because another cause of recent blackouts have been failure of high tension power lines - they just plain fell off. Why? They haven't been maintained. The company responsible for the infrastructure decided it was cheaper and simpler to fix things when broken than to maintain them - don't be too scornful, most of us do this with our cars, our homes, even our own bodies. If we're unwilling to maintain the electric grid we have already, I'm sceptical that we can improve it as needed.

So again, simply whacking in electric vehicles will do us no good. We need other things to change, too. That's things like improved public transport (not everyone should have cars, whatever they're powered with), distributed energy generation to improve grid resiliency (100 small lines are more reliable than 1 big line) and so on.

Of course this assumes all ICE vehicles are replaced with EV, which would take a generation if we tried hard. As less are replaced, it's less of a problem. But it nonetheless indicates that the problems are non-trivial, and we have to do things together, not just one thing.

Which may be obvious to you, but is not obvious to all. Many people like to think "well we'll just change to electric cars and everything will be okay." Or nuclear or solar or not eating animals anymore or whatever. But really we've chosen several ways to create our problems and so we need several solutions, too.

That's unfortunate for Australians, but is effectively irrelevant to the larger picture.

What's happening in Australia is as relevant as this article itself, which just looks at the Netherlands.

Having 40-50% of world generation contributed by coal is enough to make electric vehicles not a "plug in and play" solution, really not an improvement on internal combustion vehicles.

Again, when it comes down to it if you want to use a tonne or so of metal and plastic to move 1.5 people, it's never going to be very efficient whatever you do. Using a tonne of metal and plastic to move one or two people and then wondering why we're short of resources is like having everyone live in 220m² houses on quarter-acre blocks and then wondering why we have urban sprawl.

I have an electric car. It cost about $11,000. It caries kids, groceries and pretty much anything else I need to move. It gets about 50 miles per charge during the summer. This is almost always more than I need.

Millions of people could be using EV's as their primary vehicle, reducing dramatically our dependence on oil.

Is it for everyone? No. Is it more practical than most people think? I think so.

As others have said, I see EV's as a transition vehicle. If most new car buyers purchased EV's over the next few years, we would quickly reduce our dependence on oil and reduce GHGs because of the greater efficiency.

Plug in stations could spread very rapidly, since electric lines are ubiquitous. Already in my towns there are many plug in stations for the plug-in hybrid fleets that are part of the community car service called HourCar where you join a pool of others to use cars from the fleet as needed so you don't have to buy your own. They are starting to add solar generation to these charging stations. This all happened in the last year.

This is not rocket science. No new tech is needed. It's all off the shelf.

Mostly, we have to move to walking, biking and public transit. But the next best thing from these is EV's, especially if the energy can be generated through renewables. The efficiencies are enormous. My Zenn gets the equivalent of some 250 miles per gallon. If a large percentage of urban dwellers who now use SUV's for no good reason switched to an EV, the effect would be enormous (but I'll leave it to the math wizzes on the forum to do the exact calculations.)

Pedro,
Car models,engines, change over 10-20 years requiring complete re-tooling anyway.

If you examine further up, EV's do not need a big electric grid upgrade) mainly overnight off peak charging). We already have the electric wires, outlets in place.

Many roads are concrete only use asphalt at joins.

Oil is going to run out, electricity can be supplied by wind, hydro, solar , nuclear.

Wind energy is growing at 30% a year(doubling every 2.5 years)

Solar PV production is unfortunately quite water-intensive, too. The silicon purification process is described here. Water isn't used in it, but the chlorinated compounds waste (including hydrochloric acid) needs lots of water unless you want to pollute the area horribly, as the Chinese do.

There's no such thing as zero impact on the environment. All we can hope to do is make our impact much, much smaller than it is today. The health of the planet is a bit like the health of a human. We're all going to die someday, but we can die at 80 after years of vigorous enjoyment of life, or die at 60 after years of being obese, with achy joints, tired, and with diaorrhea or constipation, or perhaps struggle on to 90 but with the last 30 years being basically crippled.

Some impact's inevitable, we just have to minimise it. And we're FAR from the minimum right now.

Great, don't put any tax on gas. Is that going to be a pure market? How are you going to account for the hundreds of billions spent on wars to secure oil supplies? Is that outside of your wonderfully free market somehow? How convenient.

Neil1947,

You do not seem to having understood my point. Even if cars need retooling every 01-20 years, the construction of an unit of electric car (EV) needs more energy than an equivalent ICE one. If you read my analysis, I am proposing to grow in wind energy 60% per year throughout the period 2010-2030, not just 30%.

The lighter one pretends to build the EV to save weight and get more autonomy with the same battery, the more start up energy. Aluminum needs much more energy than steel. Carbon fiber even more. It is a problem of start up energy expenses, not a problem of long term balance in 50 years, because we have no 50 years to change.

I am talking on the world electric network for a world car fleet (806 million units and 73 million new ones every year, less the scratched ones), in search for a global personal transport solution. Not talking about rich American suburbia with powerful or over dimensioned electric supplies.

I am talking of having an electric network able to plug any EV anywhere, not just at home for rational, convenient smooth charging flows and rational, convenient discharging flows on daily operations.

I have discarded the simple and little reasoned solution of taking advantage of the idle installed power during nights, because no one rational design will take the networks to these limits; will not stress the existing electric networks by changing the valleys into peaks in the electric consumption profile to have an ALWAYS PEAK PROFILE. The valleys are necessary also to program network maintenances, extensions, security, etc., etc.

Do you consider that fast charging (or even low charging of 16 kWh batteries) is possible with the existing electric wires to most of the domestic dwellings in the world? Do you believe that EV’s will not need charging points (and basically FAST charging points) OUTSIDE the home garages?

Do you believe that in most of Europe or Japan, or Australia, not to talk on Latin America, South East Asia or Africa that the situation and capacity of the electric networks is the same with the electric grids?

Have you seriously considered the TWh required to power all these vehicles? Do you believe that solving the problem just in the USA is going to help the world to stabilize? Or do you believe you can live in the US in a full isolated mode?

How many roads in the US are concrete and how many asphalt of the 9 million paved roads you have there (about one linear Km per square Km of territory)?

Have you considered the efforts (and fossil fuel start up consumption in advance) and timing to build up a 13,000 MW wind network connected to the existing grid, just to supply electric energy to just the 1 million EV’s of one single year and the time to pay back the already spent energy?

We have in Spain one of the most modern control systems in the world for electric holes and peaks in the electric network. Our penetration of wind energy is 10% of our consumption and solar PV energy has reached 1% and is heading to 2% of the total national electricity consumption and we are smelling the limits to this growth and rethinking the price of having back up power plants with conventional energy for just in case. Going 30% of the total electricity from wind+solar is considered by the national electrical authority a real technical challenge that may collapse the whole national network under many different conditions and variables. Precisely because we are operating like a virtual island (we are a peninsula with poor links with France, Portugal and Morocco), we know the problems of reaching to these levels, while Denmark could easily go to 20%, because they are a very small country in the middle of a big consumerist Europe and with powerful electric interconnections with all its neighbours, producing STABLE, not intermitent electricity. Governing electric networks is not so easy, when reaching these volumes. Or will you issue laws to forgive workers to go to work on calmed or cloudy days? Or overdesign wind energy networks to store energy a la Jeremy Rifkin, in the world car fleet batery pool? For how many hours duration?

It always amazes me that nobody thinks in developing collective, public, common transportation systems and starting to forget about this sacred cow.

"If you really want to see a sacred cow, go out and see the family car".

Marvin Harris. American Society and Culture. An Overview.

You never know we northerners might be able to pump enough resources into the world's machine to keep us in chips until the temperate climate come to our neighborhood ; ) or more honestly : (

A kilogram of lithium can store AT MOST 50 MJ or 13.88 kwh: 1000/7 moles x 96500 coulumbs x 3.7 volts x .277=13.88
So a Volt plugin hybrid car(16 kwh battery with a stand by gasoline engine) has not less than 1 kg of lithium in it.
A kg of hydrogen has 143 MJ in it. A kg of gasoline has 46.4 MJ in it.

A rechargable battery can use 50% of the lithium in normal operation so that's down to 7 kwh/kg. A LiCoO2-C battery is about 7% lithium by weight so the upper limit is 490 wh/kg. Actually a lithium-ion battery gets about 160 wh/kg.

The world has 29 million tons of mineable lithium in it per USGS, but only 4.1 million tons is considered as actual reserves.

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/lithium/mcs-2009-lithi.pdf

So the theoretical limit of rechargable lithium batteries based on USGS reserves is 28.8 Twh per day (and in today's batteries 15 Twh per day). The amount of energy in all the world's gasoline is 31 ~Twh per day.
The world currently produces 18500 Twh per year or an average of 51 Twh per day.

It's hard to believe that all the lithium will go into doing nothing but feeding grid powered electric golf-carts/cars.

"Nobody has any dreams, let alone plans, for such changes."

Why do you make such blanket statements? Seek, and you will find..

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Electric_Vehicle_Recharging_Stations

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/07/22/coulomb-technologies-announces-s...

The plan is for the company to sell the Smartlet stations to municipal governments and parking lot owners and then provide the ChargePoint network to provide a subscription based public charging system for consumers.

Yes, it would take a big buildout.. but that can happen Parking Space by Parking Space, with an incentive for the company who would be selling the juice and the connection.. while an EV owner would have an incentive to economize, and possibly invest progressively in an Array of PV at home to cut their Electric Bill.. these all go in the right direction. (The economics of KWHprices and EV's in general will also be an ongoing incentive to walk or bike instead.. and to live closer to work and to shops, etc)

These cars are not ready for prime time: their range and charging time are show-stoppers.

Seriously! I mean, they're only suitable for 90+% of car journeys, and it's not like people can plug one in when they go to sleep at night, since people in the U.K. must stay up all night driving! Thank the lord we have conventional vehicles that fufill 1000% of all the car journeys those pesky Brits make at night so that they don't have to sleep. ;)

Research conducted by Professor Julia King for 2008’s King Review of low carbon cars concludes that 93% of car journeys are less than 40 kms (25 miles) and 97% are less than 80 kms (50 miles).

Most households in the US have at least 2 cars. Right now I have 4. I could trade out one for an EV without any inconvenience at all -- it would just bump the hybrid (which we use now for as many trips as we can) down one rung on the usage ladder.

I assume this will be the case for many middle class families -- an EV will handle the work commute and/or errands, and a hybrid will handle long trips.

I agree with the poster above that muses that hybrids really ought to be able to plug into NG or propane at the house and power/heat the house during mains outages. Getting more utility out of every dollar spent will be increasingly necessary.

Same here, but people are spending X3, X4 the lowest priced vehicle. If it was a choice between paying $100,000 more for a house near mass transit or close to downtown, or paying an extra $20,000 for a new PHEV, that will get 150mpg around town and 50mpg on long trips I think the PHEV will be my choice. Petrol here in Australia is about $US3.50/gallon so could easily be $8/gallon.

As far as housing goes my guess from your comment is you already own a home. Someone like me that would be looking at buying under the conditions of 8 dollar a gallon gas would make a different decision. Do I pay 20k for a depreciating asset or 100k more for one thats holding or increasing in value ?

Or probably more likely rent so I can move if my job changes so I can be close to work.

Your making and assumption that enough people will be willing and able to buy into suburban living with and EV to both make a significant difference in oil usage and two support the lifestyle. If enough people are unwilling or unable to buy the suburban house and EV's then it won't be the majority lifestyle.

Think of someone thats say 20 now and in college do you think that this person would be willing or able to buy a suburban home and two EV's in say ten years ?

I've already argued that the underlying economic support pyramid for this sort of lifestyle is dubious. Looking forward at the potential social changes it seems clear that the chances of getting our children to buy into it is dubious.

I guess I just feel like there is a lot more to it then I have a suburban house and X numbers of cars thus EV's are the solution.

And we have not even addressed maintaining the infrastructure needed to support cars period esp if we also need to build out rail networks.
If commercial traffic moves to rail then what ?

We could easily envision stores moving to be on a light rail spur for deliveries for example centralizing retail similar to the old downtowns.
Parking right now is and issue for this type of arrangement and I can't imagine it getting better.

I'm sorry but I just can't see EV's being more than a niche product no matter how I consider it. I agree that there should be a large enough market to make them commercially viable but to support the life style of the majority of people is a stretch given the conditions need to make them viable in the first place.

Kiashu,

"An electric car is to an internal combustion car what "low tar" cigarettes are to roll-your-owns. Yes, it's an improvement - but it's missing the main problem, which is that using a tonne or so of metal and plastic to move one or two people, usually less than 5km, is never going to be a very efficient use of energy."

You are expressing an attitude that is so far removed from the political and economic realities in any industrial society that it's actually counterproductive. You may not use a car, but almost everyone else does, so future solutions are going to have to consider peoples desire in a free society to have some form of personnel transport.

You could say the same thing about having a refrigerator, or why have private ownership of homes?, people can live in rented apartments, communal barracks, great energy savings!. Why not dispense with electric light?; rise and go to bed with the sun, people don't need to stay up after dark. Why live in cities, move everyone to live a peasant rural existence. Only one problem! people want refrigerators, TV, owning a house not an apartment, living in cities/suburbs, AND owning a car.

An alternative approach is the "efficiency wedge", reducing the impact of motor vehicles; replacing petrol with electricity, smaller vehicles, longer life, recycle all components, generate electricity by renewable energy. The same with refrigerators or light bulbs, or housing. Very big gains in efficiency are possible, if this means people use them more that's OK, they have a better quality of life, and still reduce the impact on the environment.

If you objection to privately owned cars is not energy use but traffic congestion, solutions other than eliminating all vehicles will be embraced by most of the population, no one likes traffic. Encouraging parking at railway stations so your neighbor can drive 1Km rather than 20 Km, not only saves 90% energy but reduced congestion by 95%, and he will be more likely to use an EV with limited battery range. Better parking will encourage others to drive that 2 or 3 Km and then also take mass transit.

I maintain we don't have an energy problem; we have a looming liquid fuels problem, we have a carbon dioxide pollution problem, we have a rising population problem in some countries and a declining population problem in others, we have a traffic problem in many cities. People are not looking for cures to solutions worse than the diseases.

An EV battery failure is not repairable and in most cases an older car would be scrapped if the cost was more than a few hundred quid because its perceived value is not dependant on its condition, but its age and status rating.

The older car will still fit the battery that is down to 80% of original capacity, thus at "end of life" - except for somebody who doesn't drive long distances and wants a cheap ride.

Goodby cheap motoring for the poorer ends of society.

With cheap oil vanishing, wouldn't that be a given without EVs?

Partypooper,
"An EV battery failure is not repairable and in most cases an older car would be scrapped if the cost was more than a few hundred quid because its perceived value is not dependant on its condition, but its age and status rating."

This has the ring of truth, in fact it was the reason I sold my second last(ICE) banger, the 12V battery died, and the car was worth less than a new battery($100). It helped that the car only got 14l/100Km, and the registration was due in 2 months. I would expect the same for aging EV's, unless only one battery died, and could be replaced with a used one as suggested by engineer-poet.
The biggest reason for dumping most old ICE cars in the future will be poor fuel economy, sometimes triggered by battery failures.

To make these options seem less dire, let me put them in some perspective..

Antarctic Expedition, 1911
"Amundsen's expedition benefited from careful preparation, good equipment, appropriate clothing, a simple primary task (Amundsen did no surveying on his route south and is known to have taken only two photographs), an understanding of dogs and their handling, and the effective use of skis. In contrast to the misfortunes of Scott's team, the Amundsen's trek proved rather smooth and uneventful."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Amundsen

"The English have loudly and openly told the world that ski and dogs are unusable in these regions and that fur clothes are rubish. We will see — we will see." - Amundson

"For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton." — Sir Raymond Priestley.

"It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport." — Fridtjof Nansen.

http://www.gdargaud.net/Humor/QuotesPolar.html

Interesting concepts, I missed this post first pass when I wrote the post below. Of course integrating the Velos and Twikes onto limited, dark (midwinter is about 80 days long with a mere four hour day dead center), ice slicked (with just the right skiff of dry wafting graphite like snow), -20F roads that run a steady stream of 4x4s doing 70mph will not be for the faint of heart.

It will be scary enough to try and run a light highway speed EV up here. I'm guessing battery and brake heat will eventually be harnessed for passenger cold weather comfort and safety (defrosting) but any additional resistance heat would be a battery drainer. We may be stuck with the ICE up here winters (which is basicly year round except for a couple months) for a while.

RAV-4-EV!!?? I know they make them, but doesn't it strike anyone else here as a travesty to try to perpetuate the enormous inefficiency of SUV's in a PO world? If that's the future of EV's, I'm against them (and I speak as an EV owner). Extremely small, lightweight vehicles that still perform most functions that cars are used for by most people on a day-to-day basis is the only way to go, if we are going to have any significant EV's at all. Why do we have to haul thousands of pounds of metal around with us just to move our sorry carcases form one spot to the next.

According to the company, the Zenn gets the equivalent of some 250 miles a gallon. That's because it adds the inherent efficiencies of electric motors with regenerative coasting and extremely light weight.

From the article:

"However, in the West, and specifically the Pacific Northwest, there is limited extra electricity because of the large amount of hydroelectric generation that is already heavily utilized. Since more rain and snow can't be ordered, it's difficult to increase electricity production from the hydroelectric plants."

It sounds like the NW would be a great place for wind energy. Between mountains, coasts and interior plains, there should be plenty available, and probably the three would have different wind rates at different times, providing more stability. And for those times when the wind is now blowing on the sea, on any mountain top, or anywhere on the plain, they can use hydro, which could be drawn down even faster in those rare, windless moments, then brought back up when the wind kicks in, as is done in Scandinavia now.

But I don't hear much about wind energy in the NW. A bit surprising given their reputation for environmentalism. I could understand that solar could be a bit less promising there, given their nearly constant cloud cover. But I have heard of PV owners getting juice up there even on their cloudy days.

Even the GM EV1 used 3-phase induction motors.  The power output is directly proportional to the drive frequency, so they have the potential to be quite light (the AC 150 drivetrain goes up to 400 Hz, IIUC).

" In this situation a fuel cell would need to be competative with a small ICE engine, which IMO will happen eventually."

hmmm. I don't think it will happen for a long time - small ICE's are pretty cheap, and fuel cells have a long way to go. It doesn't really matter: hydrogen will always be more expensive than liquid fuels and it will always be as easy or easier to produce the small amount of liquid fuel needed by a Extended Range EV.

Fuel cells for transportation were always a red herring, intended to delay CAFE requirements.

We just don't need them.