John & Angela wrote:
RCMAN46 wrote:
The USA electrical grid is a long ways off to power a very large number of cars.
Currently the USA uses about 3,913,000,000,000 kWh of electricity per year with very little extra capacity.
Electric power consumed in USA
Approximately 143,370,000,000 gallons of gasoline is consumed by the USA each year.
USA gasoline consumed
Using the EPA 1gallon of gasoline equals about 34 kWh comes to 4,862,000,000,000 kWh per year.
I'm not up on the capacity of the US grid. However looking at the province of BC as an an example, on the BC hydro website they estimate that if tomorrow morning we woke up and every gas and diesel burning vehicle were electric, the increased demand on the grid would increase by 19 percent. Present over capacity is 31 percent and this is expected to grow. The average electric vehicle uses the equivalent of a house hold electric water heater on an annualized basis. Lots of misinformation out there. Electric vehicles are not right for everyone and every situation but they work well in many situations. I think the towing role in North America will be dominated by gas and diesel vehicles for at least another decade.
The U.S. has made estimates, the increased overall capacity is well within reach even assuming a faster than expected uptake (which if Tesla pulls off that insanely fast production ramp could happen). The estimate was on the higher end for the U.S. around 30% if memory serves. The European countries that are mandating switches (and so have a lot more reason to have put some serous engineering into the estimates) are estimating 20-30% which is in line with the B.C. estimates. Note B.C. has a warm climate in the populated parts, which makes a big difference as electric heat uses a lot of electricity.
There is a huge mistake in the earlier calculation (RCMAN46). Simply converting *current* gasoline usage to kilowatts totally ignores the highly increased efficiency of electric cars at converting the energy. The number is like 4 times too large.
Places like Ontario that are trying to install large numbers of charging stations (with mixed success) are not seeing the overall grid capacity as the issue, it is the local loop grid - the last 10 kilometers or so. The charging stations are out where there was previously lowish demand for electricity, on highways and now they suddenly have to allow for dozens of chargers being on at full demand and sucking the power of several houses each.
