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A Foreseen Foreseeable
It looks as if I was wrong about something: I thought charging electric cars at night would be great because it smooths out the daily power cycle for the utility companies, but it turns out that not only is the California power grid unable to handle the load, but there’s a partially hidden truth.
Here is the partially hidden truth [emphasis mine]:
“The ISO also said residents should avoid ‘use of large appliances and turning off extra lights,’ and wrote that ‘[T]his usually happens in the evening hours when solar generation is going offline and consumers are returning home and switching on air conditioners, lights, and appliances.’ “
Put another way, not only is their grid ill-prepared to handle the increasing demand (to be worsened if they go to all-electric cars), but they have an insufficient base load as well. California Green Energy: coming soon to a grid near you . . .
Published in Technology
The term “California Duck” is used to describe the shape of the load curve that must be handled by other generation when solar is netted out:
https://www.ge.com/news/reports/california-duck-must-die-not-think
It is so bizarre that in an age of energy plenty, that there is artificial scarcity.
It reminds me of a Connections episode where the Germans were messing around with bread. Basically, they forbid growing local wheat, and forbid the importation of cheep bread.
Unfortunately already here in Texas, as we found out this winter and last week. I suspect that much of the country has insufficient base load power to handle the push towards EVs.
Yup. No matter how many times I bring up the “where is the electrical power going to come from?” question in discussions about the glory and wonder of electric cars, I never get an answer, and the question is quickly buried under all the cool bells and whistles of a Tesla.
Power companies always operate at near-capacity – why build it if you’re not going to use it? (Kinda like ICU beds in a hospital – they are always around 90% full, so to “overwhelm them” with Covid or whatever is not hard. But that’s a discussion for another day.)
You can’t add a significant number of electric loads to the grid without building some new generation plants, which greenies are almost universally against. You also need power distribution – power lines all over the place – which greenies are almost universally against.
And of course you need to fuel those plants, with either coal, hydro, natural gas, or nuclear, all of which greenies are almost universally against.
Greenies believe a lot of wacky stuff, but possibly the most head-scratching belief is that there is a free lunch, if only they want it badly enough. (Everybody! Clap for Tinkerbell! C’mon, clap!)
Baseline energy needs are best met thru nuclear & hydroelectric but the Greens refuse to allow them to be built- the China syndrome & snail darters you know! For surge capacity the best solution is gas fired turbines- but the Greens hate fracking & pipelines. So we are left with unstable power generation by wind & solar- thereby ensuring situations like Texas last winter & California this summer. Ask any engineer in the power generation industry….
What? I’m shocked, SHOCKED! to find out that there is no solar power generated when the sun goes down! Learn something new every day.
Well I’d like to forbid the importation of bread made with birds too. I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.
Living in northern Virginia, I am surrounded by Teslas. I think we may have the most Teslas in the country but I haven’t been to California so can’t say for sure. I would love to know how Dominion Energy and the other energy companies supplying VA are doing in meeting this demand. There’s even a Tesla around here with ‘RayPower’ for its license plate. I don’t think so but try telling that to a greenie.
This is a great comment. The answers are not beyond our technology, they are just politically unacceptable right now. As Thomas Sowell has said, there are no solutions, just trade-offs.
I am hoping that the people of Texas are smart enough to start building more capacity, and from a reliable source rather than more windmills. There’s no point hoping that Californians will figure it out.
Where the power comes from is the most obvious problem that the electric car enthusiasts ignore. And electric cars themselves have some serious shortcomings.
I’m irritated by the use of public funds to support these fetishists. If these electric vehicles were commercially viable, we wouldn’t need to subsidize practically every purchase. I’m not saying we need to repress the industry, but sink or swim. You want to pay an extra $20K for an electric, go nuts. But stay out of my pocket.
I’m trying to remember the federal “infrastructure” appropriation that built all those gas stations we currently use. Commercial gain (pardon the pun) fueled the proliferation of gas stations, not government. Our current boondoggle includes building a half million charging stations. Again, if its a great idea, why does it need massive subsidy? If you could make money charging cars, entreprenuers would be building them all over the place. The fact that they aren’t tells me something.
And inevitably, when there are enough charging stations around, they’ll begin jacking up the tax on gas and diesel to encourage purchase of the cars (with subsidies) that use the charging stations (with subsidies) while imposing tax burdenss on gasoline which will reduce the number of gas powered vehicles on the road.
If you don’t get the power part of this strory correct, the federal government will have effectively eliminated free movement that we all want. Or at least it’ll be limited to the well off and government class poobahs.
And there’s a bonus adverse effect of making us miserable to appease Marxist control freaks all around the world. If we’re no longer using up all that gas and diesel, demand will obviously decrease. That will decrease the cost of fuel to, say China, who will helpfully build our electric cars (and components) while enjoying low fuel costs. We’ll be effectively subsidizin them, too.
Who voted for this nonsense?
And as far as hydro goes, this is one way in which the current Left differs from the older Left. Both the American New Dealers and the Soviet Communists were very proud of their hydro projects.
And if you think about it, hydro is really a form of solar, with the benefit of integral storage capacity.
Each of Texas’s two nuclear plants could accommodate 3 reactors and each only has 2. That is where we should be looking at some expansion.
So, going green makes it hard to go green.
It is so bizarre that in an age of knowledge plenty, that there is so much stupidity.
You and the California “experts” and legislators.
There really isn’t any hope.
Claire Berlinski once commented that she did not understand California’s chronic water shortages. Israel, she said, uses desalination for its water needs and has been for quite a while.
Well, seeing as half of California is moving to Texas, I think that’s a forlorn hope.
I’ve learned well the entire Tesla model line up through my No. VA lens–there’s a sleek one, a little one, and a fat one. They also have what looks like a vertical laptop on the dash. I wonder if there’s a mouse.
Do you have WaWa’s? Ours was reasonably incapacitated for awhile while 6-8 Tesla charging stations were being installed. I assume that these are available 24/7, like the gas, but have no idea how that factors into the power grid or what the cost is associated with using them.
Shouldn’t there be a requirement to do the charging with solar power?
The one in Vienna? Of course, no gas pumps because we’re special. Sigh. Although, with all the Teslas around here WaWa is pretty smart to put in the charging stations – until it’s not smart.
The first is a regulation problem. Stupidity is an inability to learn. Therefore, I think you are referring to ignorance. Ignorance is a filtering problem.
Ignorance and willful blindness are two different things.
Thinking you are smarter than everyone else is its own type of stupid.
[I don’t have real knowledge, just anecdotal information from when I made frequent visits to a company facility in Silicon Valley a few years ago.] Supposedly, so many people had installed solar panels that were connected to “sell” electricity into the grid that some afternoons there was actually excess power coming into the grid. The local utility was encouraging people to charge their electric cars during the day to use this excess power from solar panels.
There I was trying to be facetious with something that might have actual value in some locales.
Mine’s in Loudoun. I don’t even know how these work financially. You stick in a credit card and you pay by the Kw? Does WaWa mark up the juice like they do gas? What’s in it for them?
Yeah, I was told that solar panels the size of a carport roof was about the right size to charge a car parked under the carport during the day, at least in a sunny place like Silicon Valley.
I’m pretty sure the lefties would be the first to cry uncle in the energy starved world they wish for – how for example will they push those virtue-signaling tweets without iPhones and the power to run them.
https://ricochet.com/990313/smacked-upside-the-head-by-an-idea-that-i-should-have-seen-earlier/
Typically less wind too, when the sun goes down. Solar heating accounts for a lot of it.