
America’s Power Grid Isn’t Ready for Electric Cars - watchdogtimer
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/12/americas-power-grid-isnt-ready-electric-cars/577507/
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chmaynard
Citylab.com has published some great articles, but this isn't one of them.
It's not clear to me why they published this article or who the intended
audience is. And I'm skeptical of the conclusions, given that the article
doesn't mention the rise of wind and PV solar power generation coupled with
energy storage capacity.

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curyous
FYI, electric cars can also act as grid energy storage capacity.

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ants_a
Could, in theory, with additional hardware and integration and agreements
needed.

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natch
This piece is an obvious plant by the anti-electric lobby.

The article does not mention the word "battery" in any of its forms
("battery", "batteries") even once. And yet batteries are the proven solution
to exactly the problem they are pretending is unsolvable.

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mchannon
Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil
refineries.

Almost all of it goes to making “branchy” isomers needed for gasoline, or
things like hydro desulfurization. Reduce the demand for gasoline and diesel,
and now you have surplus electricity, which so happens to be more per gallon
than the equivalent electrical energy in a gge of EV usage.

This isn’t a panacea- if you don’t have refineries in the area, and/or their
power can’t be fed to the grid, you might have a problem.

California and Texas are solid, though.

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reitzensteinm
I tried looking, and couldn't find anywhere close to a source that says that
refining gasoline consumes so much electricity you'd get more mileage using it
to power a BEV. Do you have something

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mchannon
This page, although a bit sloppy maybe, has a lot of referenced links in it
that should help you find what you're looking for:

[https://greentransportation.info/energy-
transportation/gasol...](https://greentransportation.info/energy-
transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html)

~~~
reitzensteinm
Yeah, that was one place I looked. But the only credible linked calculation
had it at 0.2, not 6.

The others seem to conflate energy with electricity consumption (it doesn't at
all surprise me that the process uses a lot of _energy_ , just the supposed
electrical consumption).

Further, the back of the napkin just doesn't work out. The US refines 18.5
million barrels a day (for 2012 from WP), or 283 billion gallons a year. This
implies 1698 billion kWh of consumption out of 4015 billion kWh total
electrical production, or more than the total which is used by industry (one
third).

You seemed to know what you were talking about which is why I asked for a
source... I have a very hard time believing it's even within an order of
magnitude of the correct figure.

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mchannon
Although I'm finding it hard to find confirmation (or denial), I believe
refineries have captive power plants as part of their operations, which are
effectively isolated from the grid, and kept out of aggregate electricity
generation statistics (they always seem to call it "net electricity" for some
reason and maybe this is part of why).

~~~
reitzensteinm
But those captive power plants would have to add up to be a third of the
capacity of the power plants on the main grid - that's a huge amount.

If the process uses a lot of heat, and you're why wouldn't you just skip the
electricity generation and use the thermal energy directly? So presumably the
electrical consumption to the extent it exists is for a more sophisticated use
than that.

I would suggest (in the absence of other evidence) the government report
linked above is correct - that it's relatively efficient in terms of
electricity consumption, but not in terms of overall energy consumption.

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mchannon
Check out [http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-
salazar.pdf](http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-salazar.pdf)

Texas has 2GW of refinery cogen capacity alone.

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reitzensteinm
According to the numbers in that document, that's equivalent to 0.46 kWh per
gallon. It also notes:

"The comparison of both graphics suggests that refineries in Texas have excess
capacity in many cases"

Compared to a "typical requirement". The slope of the line for "typical
requirement" is 0.22 kWh per gallon. This either means Texan refineries are
atypically inefficient, or they sell power back to the grid or shut down their
power plants.

Either way, we're still an order of magnitude away from the 6 kWh/gallon
figure, and from sources that look fairly credible.

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mchannon
Fair enough.

I do know that extraction and pipelines also require prodigious amounts of
power. Obviously not so much that it’s uneconomical, but seeing the electric
bill for one oil well in the Permian was eye-opening, particularly at the
3c/kWh rate they somehow got. It’d be nice to know the range for different
kinds of oil wells. Maybe that’s the source of the electrical use.

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8bitsrule
Thanks to decades of stalling-off and fossil-fueled obstructive lobbying, so
far we've largely failed to build anywhere-near-adequate de-centralized and
alternative energy sources.

Originally the fossilers hoped to keep viable alternatives out of the public
eye. Now that that's failed, they've got paid foolers running around.

Rome's burning. Nobody wants to make the small sacrifices, nobody wants to
think about the Big Sacrifice. So it goes.

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angry_octet
It is pretty average that they didn't discuss the fact that the peaking power
plants are very expensive, typically burning higher grade fuels like natural
gas or diesel, rather than goal or nuclear. And, rather than encourage old
style night time off-peak use, we need charging to occur during solar PV peak
on colder days, and cars (mobile batteries) to supply to the grid during peak
summer load, providing grid stabilisation to account for wind/PV variability.

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woodandsteel
What if, as seems quite certain, much of the electricity is supplied from off
the grid by solar energy at homes, work places, shopping malls, and so on?

It seems the me the article was designed to make the problem look more
difficult than it really is, as a way of undermining the adoption of EV's.

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basicplus2
All that oil not used in cars could be used to power charging stations...

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vbuwivbiu
obviously bollocks

