[mem0r1]

The argumentation is flawed.

1. Just imagine the required charging infrastructure if all vehicles were suddenly battery powered. Charging electric vehicles requires quite some power. Can the power grid installations sustain that (power lines, Transformer stations...) ? What resources (financial and physical (e.g. Cooper)) are required in order to adapt the infrastructure ? Just an example: A supercharger station which can charge a few cars at "full speed" simultaneously can draw > 1 Megawatt. Furthermore, superchargers are quite complex (and expensive) technology;

2. Batteries are not a suitable large scale energy storage. However, non-dispatchable, fluctuating energy sources such as solar and wind power require huge amounts of storage in order to sustain the power demand.

[re]

> The argumentation is flawed.

Which argumentation are you referring to? You're re-iterating an anti-electric talking point that is explicitly debunked in the article.

> “That's nonsense,” says Liebreich. “[In] 1995, [people said] ‘we'll never use the internet because there are not enough modems’. [In] 2000, ‘we'll never do online video because there isn't enough bandwidth’, then, ‘you can't do multiple streams of video because you will never get fibre to the home’. We’ve got 30 years between now and 2050 [when countries plan to reach net-zero emissions] and we will simply have more and more investment. We’ve dug up the streets for cable, phone, gas, cable, fibre, electricity. It's a thing we do. We know how to just build slowly over time. This is not rocket science.

> “Plus, there's smart charging. And of course, we know we're going to be doing this because we're also going to be having to add capacity because of electric heating. And so the idea that you'll say, ‘no, no, we mustn't do that extension of existing infrastructure, we must build a completely new one [for hydrogen refuelling], it's nonsense, frankly.”

[toomuchtodo]

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/blog-can-the-g... ("A question that frequently comes up when discussing electric vehicles (EVs) is: “Can the grid handle it?” The short answer is “yes.”") [Blog post demonstrates the math showing the grid can handle 100% EVs]

Superchargers are primarily for road trips and people who need to fast charge because they don’t have home charging (for now; infra is rolling out very fast). Most will charge at home, work, or other locations that perhaps have a level 2 charger (vs a fast DC charger). A 120V 15amp outlet is sufficient to fully charge your vehicle if left for 2-3 days or more at an airport or other longer dwell location.

> Batteries are not a suitable large scale energy storage.

They will get us most of the way to success. Some combination of seasonal storage, renewables overbuilding, transmission, and limited fossil generation (peakers, cogeneration, etc) will be needed to get close to 100% net zero.

https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

https://www.energy-storage.news/nrel-rapid-growth-of-energy-...

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81779.pdf

Enough sunlight falls on the Earth every ~2 minutes to power humanity for a year. We're just arguing shuffling the electrons around.

[tekknik]

> Most will charge at home, work, or other locations that perhaps have a level 2 charger

with the push for cheaper, multi tenant housing where you have many households sharing the same parking lot, how does charging at home work? How do you bill the person charging? What if every spot has its own charger?

[t3rabytes]

Re 1: The US built 1,000,000 new homes last year without anyone saying "how we the country cope with this increase in need for wood/etc". Most new homes will have multiple 50A circuits to power an electric range and/or HVAC system. Most level 2 electric car chargers max at 50-75A, and can be configured to only charge during times of low grid power demand. Every electric car in existence won't be DC fast charging all the time. In fact, I'd wager for most EV owners in the US today, DC fast charging is a very very low percent of their total charge allocation (between DC fast and AC level 2).

[tekknik]

We have plenty of wood, go outside and see for yourself. We currently have very visible issues with the power grid, and as you’ve pointed out you’ve doubled every houses power demand.

Let’s look at what happened in TX, when the grid shut down. How will people charge their cars to leave the area? Maybe people used the gasoline engine in their car to provide heat.

[t3rabytes]

TX has a mismanaged power grid with no interconnects to load share by choice, how does that apply to the rest of the US? CA’s problems aren’t demand driven.

I live in a state that gets almost its entire gasoline supply from a single pipeline (Colonial) that has burst or leaked and left us with mass shortages several times in the last decade.

[tekknik]

Yet your problem is not nationwide, at least two states are having issues.

[jcfrei]

Re 1: Charging mostly happens overnight where there isn't a lot of demand. Smart meters can distribute the demand to spread it out optimally. BEVs are actually very valuable for the electrical grid when they can feed their power back into it - further balancing supply and demand.

Re 2: Batteries keep getting cheaper due to economies of scale. Batteries for grid stabilization don't need high energy density and will soon (or maybe already are) more cost effective than pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

[ertgbnm]

Your argument is textbook anti-EV propaganda that has been debunked for over a decade now.

Ask anyone that owns an EV how many times a month they go to a super charger. The answer is probably zero because unless they went on a road trip, they are definitely charging at home. You don't even need to install a 240V charger. For most people's commute a 120V charger (which can charge at ~1.4 kw) can recharge about 40 miles over night which is equivalent to the average American's commute.

It's still not ideal for apartment dwellers yet, but they don't need a super charger in their complex. They just need a standard power outlet accessible from their parking space.

I know managing the grid is probably really hard. But if we can power every home in America in less than a century, I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to add standard power outlets to parking garages without crashing the economy.

EV's are in fact a solution to the sporadic nature of renewables since they can charge anytime the car is sitting still such as for the 8 hours of sunshine that people spend in office buildings every day.

[jrajav]

Source for either of these claims other than "just imagine?"

Of course infrastructure is a concern but I haven't seen any sources that claim we are unprepared to sustain significant EV deployment - and of course it will not ever happen overnight, so that's a strawman.

[tekknik]

have you not paid attention to the rolling blackouts in CA? or what happened in TX recently?

[wilg]

1. Yeah, we upgrade the grid over time as demand increases, exactly as we have been doing. Nobody gets bent out of shape when a grocery store or something goes in and it requires power. This is only a problem if vehicles are "suddenly" battery powered, which is not a thing.

2. Yes they are.

[tekknik]

You forgot that the power station is a centralized point of failure, where as the fuel distribution network is not. This make the power stations a much more valuable target as you can easily disable a country’s transportation infrastructure.