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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
There would have been a lot less trouble, perhaps overall none at all, if the power plants and natural gas facilities had been properly insulated etc to withstand the cold. Many of the power plants could have been operating, if they had been.
So is wind power, but without the storage capacity.
Claire seems to get stupider by the year. As regards the People’s Republic of California, last I heard they haven’t built a new water storage facility since the 1970s, during which time the population has multiplied.
But during the day, aren’t those cars at wherever those people work?
Time again:
(in case you don’t recognize it, that’s Obama with the ears.)
They work at home now. And if they don’t they need two electric cars.
Why, with TWO electric cars, that would certainly DOUBLE their efficiency and green-ness!
Yes. For years, Saudi Arabia has piped its desalinated water 270 miles from the coast to Riyadh, in the interior.
California won’t save their own water (rain, etc) and they won’t build their own power plants for desalination either.
Imma stop you right there, as they say on the internet, and just wave to a fellow citizen who enjoyed the work of James Burke. He wrote some of the most intellectually invigorating TV shows ever made, and was my absolute hero and model of a modern intellectual when I was in the 20s. I was lucky enough to interview him in the early 90s, and I remember we spent a lot of time talking about our Macs, because we had the same model – Quadra 660AV – and were bedeviled by the machine’s unusually aggressive disk-access sound. He was smart and genial and utterly decent, a firehose of chat, and perhaps the most influential thinkers on my own way of apprehending the world: find the connections. Draw this to that. Inhabit the times, see what they saw. Never underestimate the creative power unleashed by the desire for profit; never demean the accomplishments that arose from pursuit of profit. Celebrate the forgotten who pushed something forward. Be humble. Be wary. Never stop inventing.
And try not to do things like “Issue an executive order to restrain Big Business”.
I found his shows to be one of the most eye opening series ever.
I am filled with envy you got to talk to the man!
I thought the problem was the entire power infrastructure was not designed for such temperatures and snow . . .
It’s like money. The left thinks it simply appears out of nowehere, or that the government can print as much as it wants with no repercussions . . .
Even hydroelectric has its problems when there are droughts. Still, it’s better than solar and wind, but the left wants to undam every river and stream . . .
If I owned a Tesla (which I wouldn’t mind), Google Maps shows Tesla charging stations. They aren’t exactly popping up like daisys, but I am seeing more and more of them . . .
Teslas should have a solar roof. In my sci-fi novels, cars have a bodies made of Solskin, a solar panel material as strong as steel, but with solar ray capture technology woven in . . .
Fossil Fuel energy is also traceable to Solar energy, follow the chain: coal, oil, gas: dinosaurs, plants, sunlight. So, it’s all Solar energy, what’s the fuss about? It’s just about the method of storage. Oh, and density. And reliability. And affordability.
And, perhaps most important, scalability.
There’s a car like that in Robert A. Heinlein’s classic story, “Coventry” (1940).
I didn’t look up the numbers, but I suspect the drawback is that you’d have to leave the Tesla parked in the sun for about a week, to drive it for an hour.
“Elon Musk Says EVs Will Double World’s Need for Electricity” December 1, 2020 https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2020/12/elon-musk-says-evs-will-double-worlds-need-for-electricity/
California denies that reality.
Thank goodness science fiction technology can recharge cars in a minute or two!
Leftists always say something like, “We’ll make our electric devices more efficient so we don’t need any new power generation.” In the nuke business, we call touting efficiency as a new power source “negawatts”. The truth is, you can only increase efficiency of any device – electrical or mechanical – up to a point short of its theoretical limit because of the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
And what are those laws in plain English?
Did the ISO really say to avoid turning on the large appliances in the evening?
I should not be shocked but I am.
For years, circa 2009 to 2015, we were told to Delay turning on our large appliances until the evening. That way the tremendous load of energy needed to power all the air conditioning would not have washing machines and dryers running as an additional burden.
Our county was visited by PG & E representatives one summer. The message was: use as little energy as possible, and also do as much as you can in the evening or night.
Our supervisors roundly opposed them. One supe mentioned that his son had a business that used compression machinery. Should he shut down during the day and use the machinery at night? But if he did, would his customers like the new hours of 7PM to 5AM?
Other supes mentioned that the biggest use of electricity was for fans and AC – and since it cools off significantly at night, then what we basically were being asked to do was to fry in the 98% plus temps during the day, and use the electricity for AC only at night when not needed.
Our county failed to join the less well represented counties who fell for the “Save The Planet/Save the Power Gridlock” scheme. (Plus its common knowledge that PG & E gets us to conserve so they can sell the electricity to other states.)