The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
Demand management as a strategy for electricity production becomes both much easier, and completely politically impossible - It will be trivial to shift electricity consumption around within the day-night cycle, because of the enormous battery capacity of the veichle fleet, but if you strand people with dead cars because monday->wensday were quiet, cloudy days, you get lynched, politically. Possibly literally too.
I think this favors nukes, but any powersource which is reliable on a day to day basis wins (desert solar, yes. Rooftop solar, no.) Peak producers loose.
Berlin energy supplier Lekker Energie and battery company DBM Energy have teamed up to electrify an Audi A2 and take it on an attention-getting 605 km (379.9 mile) journey from Munich to Berlin, Germany. The run, conducted at night, was such a success that the team is claiming an electric vehicle world record of sorts. While the Japan EV Club managed to squeeze 1,003 km (623 miles) from their Mira on a track driving a steady 40km/h (25 miles per hour), this latest feat was performed on public roads at an average speed of 55 miles per hour. The Germans even had 18 percent of the pack's 115 kWh left at the end.
Then again, Controversy, skepticism surround DBM 375-mile battery
Say a company claims it has a battery pack that has set an amazing range record but then the vehicle that the battery powered ends up destroyed in a warehouse fire. What would you think? Well, this is the exact scenario that DBM Energy GmbH is facing.
Leaving aside for the moment the insanity of having so many individual cars in urban environments.
as a question of human behavior I really do not think any significant fraction of the car owning public is going to start any given day with less than a full charge on their car.
Math: Let us assume that you are a foster parent in France, take care of nine kids, and thus you drive a monster of a people mover with a onehundred kwh battery, and you go through one charge per week. Top it off to full each night during generic offpeak hours, and you are out 8.75 euros /week. Most of which is, in fact, taxes. Which you cannot avoid by messing about trying to time the electricity market. So, at most, if you watch the weather reports like a hawk, and plan your driving very carefully around them, you save.. 2 euros per week. 104 euros per year. And this assumes that you are driving the electric equivalent of a SUV. For a smaller car, it is going to be half that. Nobody is going to actually do this - it is far too much work for far too little return - Certainly it will not be common enough to affect overall demand at all. The day/night demandshifting works because it is automated and transparent to the consumer - Plug in at night, charged by dawn.
And if we move demand onto electricity, we'll push the price up anyway.
When people start charging their cars massively at home, demand will equalize and so will price. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
Top it off to full each night during generic offpeak hours, and you are out 8.75 euros /week. Most of which is, in fact, taxes. Which you cannot avoid by messing about trying to time the electricity market.
You're assuming that the tax is flat-rate pr. kWh, rather than, say, proportional to the bill. In a smart grid, this is a stupid way to tax electricity, for precisely the reason you stress.
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
Thing is, I really dont think they would get enough custom to survive, unless their actual income base is as an convenience store/place to get your car washed.
In Sweden at least, they are already mainly convenience stores geared towards drivers. This causes some problems today in the countryside where filling up gas on long routes can be useful. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
For instance, Madrid's M40 ring road is an 80km roundtrip, and I have done that on occasion when I have driven to work, then in the evening picked up my girlfriend from work because we wanted to do some errand or other elsewhere. tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker
I'm open to nukes as part of the solution - I strongly suspect that if they're necessary their lack will kill more people than the safety issues ever will - but it's not clear that they are necessary.
French electric demand right now is around 500 TWh. So we're talking an increase by 20% only, a lot of it which can take place at night, as you mentioned. But a smoothing out of demand will actually make the integration of renewables easier, as the capacity to deal with intra-day changes will still be there and will be just as easily able to deal with intermittent renewable generation - it's just that gas-fired plants may work at night, to replace solar, than during the day, as a top up to nukes... Wind power
Nope, it won't (at least in the system used in the U.S.). The thermal time constants of the transformers supplying residential power is quite long, a day or so. During the day, when demand is high, they heat up. Part of designing the distribution system is to balance the heat generated during the day with the cooling available at night. If the night-time load goes up, then there's not enough cooling time, and the transformers catch on fire.
It takes a lot of coal to make gasoline Quick draw critics of the electric car often (miss their target) criticize EV's because in their words "Electric cars simply replace a tail pipe with a smokestack" The gist of their argument is that the emissions still occur, not at the tail pipe but at the electric power plant. That great observation is usually followed by the statement that 45% of our grid electricity is coal and coal is dirty thus the EV provides no net gain. (...) It is a simple fact that just the refining of gasoline requires approximately 6 kwh of electricity per gallon of gasoline. In fact electricity and natural gas cost are estimated to be 43% of the US oil refineries total expenses. If you tack on the energy required to extract and transport the oil to the refinery and then to the gas stations as well as the energy cost of the gas station, I'm sure that number jumps a few more kwh per gallon. So let's be conservative and cut the oil guys a break and say it takes 8kwh to extract, ship, refine and transport each gallon of gas. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Drum roll....... It takes more electricity to drive the average gasoline car 100 miles, than it does to drive an electric car 100 miles. A gas car at the US fleet average of 21mpg will consume approximately five gallons of gasoline which took 40kwh (5 times 8)of electricity to make, to drive 100 miles. An electric car will use approximately 30 kwh of electricity (3.3 miles per kwh) to drive the same 100 miles.
Quick draw critics of the electric car often (miss their target) criticize EV's because in their words "Electric cars simply replace a tail pipe with a smokestack" The gist of their argument is that the emissions still occur, not at the tail pipe but at the electric power plant. That great observation is usually followed by the statement that 45% of our grid electricity is coal and coal is dirty thus the EV provides no net gain.
(...)
It is a simple fact that just the refining of gasoline requires approximately 6 kwh of electricity per gallon of gasoline. In fact electricity and natural gas cost are estimated to be 43% of the US oil refineries total expenses. If you tack on the energy required to extract and transport the oil to the refinery and then to the gas stations as well as the energy cost of the gas station, I'm sure that number jumps a few more kwh per gallon.
So let's be conservative and cut the oil guys a break and say it takes 8kwh to extract, ship, refine and transport each gallon of gas.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Drum roll.......
It takes more electricity to drive the average gasoline car 100 miles, than it does to drive an electric car 100 miles. A gas car at the US fleet average of 21mpg will consume approximately five gallons of gasoline which took 40kwh (5 times 8)of electricity to make, to drive 100 miles. An electric car will use approximately 30 kwh of electricity (3.3 miles per kwh) to drive the same 100 miles.
This is California and power uses may be different elsewhere, but this is still an impressive comparison... Wind power
Not specifically nukes. Any power source without huge seasonal or day-to-day variability will do. But we are going to need a lot of it.
But nukes has a somewhat unpredictable security variation which forces them to quickly go off line from time to time.
However, what matters is not the variability of the individual plant, but of the system as a whole. So lots of wind over a large area - say Europe - should do the trick, and so should lots of nukes over Europe, or lots of wind and nuke over Europe. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
so if you leave your battery disconnected after charging, it lasts longer, but you're leaching without seeding.
unless you're paid for the seeding part, or the batteries are owned by the utility...
how to work around that inconvenient truth? 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
by Oui - Dec 5
by gmoke - Nov 28
by Oui - Dec 69 comments
by Oui - Dec 6
by Oui - Dec 41 comment
by Oui - Dec 2
by Oui - Dec 142 comments
by Oui - Dec 16 comments
by gmoke - Nov 303 comments
by Oui - Nov 3012 comments
by Oui - Nov 2838 comments
by Oui - Nov 2713 comments
by Oui - Nov 2511 comments
by Oui - Nov 24
by Oui - Nov 221 comment
by Oui - Nov 22
by Oui - Nov 2119 comments
by Oui - Nov 1615 comments
by Oui - Nov 154 comments
by Oui - Nov 1319 comments