Electric Vehicles: Confronting the Tough Realities
Glenn Doty is an extremely senior scientist who studies the macro-world of energy, and doesn’t like what he sees regarding electric transportation. He writes:
While I have tremendous respect for you and the work that you are doing, I have very little respect for the people who compiled that study that you referenced.
The simple truth is that you cannot claim “grid mix” for a new marginal increase in grid demand. If you plug in a new toy (EV), they can’t do a rain dance to get additional energy from the hydropower dam… nor will they amp up the local nuclear reactor to provide more power… The only possible source for the energy going into NEW demand will be what is currently SPARE capacity – that’s natural gas and coal.
The difference between gas and coal is cost. Coal costs less. So if you plug in a vehicle every night and charge it over 8 hours or so, that represents a constant and predictable nightly increase in demand… the power company WILL respond by tamping down their coal power plants a little less each night. That’s just the reality of the current grid.
I respond:
Glenn:
Thanks. But don’t you think there is merit to these ideas?
1) In some ways (e.g., national security) replacing oil is actually more important than replacing coal. As I wrote the other day, “There is nothing more patriotic the typical American can do than cut his use of oil, which is currently driving the country further into debt each day, while empowering our sworn enemies.” Certainly James Woolsey, whom I interviewed for my first book believes this to be the case, and provides a great deal of back-up for his belief that I find quite compelling. You’ll recall that Woolsey ran the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for four years; it’s hard to imagine anyone in a better position to make this call.
2) Coal plants dump power to ground every night, as they can’t ramp to follow load effectively. In fact, the more you force coal plants to ramp, according to Dr. Marie Corio, arguably the world’s foremost expert on the subject, the more you screw them up (my words, not hers). Bringing EVs online provides a home for this off-peak power, and, maybe even more importantly, for the enormous amount of wind that is curtailed or sold at unattractive prices.
3) Smart-grid will represent a huge boon to energy savings generally, and EVs/V2G (vehicle to grid) have the potential to play an important role here in empowering smart-grid.
4) Whatever the grid-mix is today, it’s only going to get cleaner as time goes by. The long-term trajectory for EVs, in which we replace the one billion cars and trucks on our roads (worldwide), will require several decades, as it will demand consumer acceptance, OEMs scaling their operations, costs coming down, and the build-out of the charging infrastructure. At the same time, we’ll be bringing on more renewables – of a blend no one can possibly predict – though almost certainly dominated by solar and wind.
Of course, all this may not happen as I’ve outlined here, which is why I’m such a big supporter of the work you folks are doing with synthetic fuels. In fact, I’ve written a great deal about your fantastic efforts at WindFuels.
Thanks for being a part of the dialog, Glenn.
Craig,
I’ll bite… but I cannot give this nearly the time it deserves. I apologize for terseness in my response here – I wasn’t anticipating a public debate when I first responded.
1. The issue concerning patriotism isn’t specific to oil… it’s imports at large. Substituting 1 gallon/day of oil import for an up-front import of a vehicle which carries a $15,000 premium doesn’t make any sense, especially when that vehicle will require more coal to be mined, more mountains destroyed, more strip mines gouged… all so more SO2, NOX, mercury and other heavy metals, and other harmful toxins can be belched out locally within the U.S. In imported oil, most of the severe damage is done abroad, while comparitively very little damage is done in America.
While I certainly agree that driving a smaller car, car-pooling, telecommuting, etc.. absolutely helps America, as these options decrease our energy import AND decrease our overall import AND decrease our emissions… I do not believe a successful argument can be made that switching directly from oil to coal by using a very expensive imported device is in any way helpful to America.
2. I’m probably one of the more referenced sources in the world concerning energy wasting, negative priced energy, and energy curtailment… as it’s been a goal of mine over the last 3 years to convey these problems to the public in easily understood dialogue. I certainly was one of the first and loudest in calling the crash of the wind industry due to excess nighttime energy, and as you know we are working on a novel grid integration platform that will help stabilize the grid by taking that excess energy and using it to recycle the carbon in CO2 back into liquid fuels.
But that excess energy is only available in certain areas: The region must have very large wind resources and very poor hydropower resources… So we’re talking about the great plains. Effectively, we’re talking about a region with very low population densities which can be beset by incredibly cold weather in the winter. This is the worst market imaginable for the EV. In more favorable markets, there is no excess nighttime energy, no energy wasting, and little-to-no wind curtailment.
3. The V2G concept is bizzare. This isn’t an attack against you personally… but please try to step back and re-evaluate this by first asking yourself this question: will the EV be used as a car, or as a battery? It cannot be used as both. If it’s used as a car, then commuters will be out living their lives or working at the time in which the grid most desperately needs the energy stored in the car’s batteries, and if the batteries are depleted to give energy to the grid then those people will be stuck at work or at the mall or something while their batteries charge for several hours after the “peak” demand period ends at ~7:00 pm.
4. Again, we are back to the point of the grid mix… and that is a completely false assumption. Regardless of “grid mix” there would be little-to-no spare capacity in solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear power (all of these power sources cost too much to overbuild), while there will be an ever-increasing amount of spare capacity from fossil resources (legacy infrastructure).
I’ll illustrate:
Let’s suppose the grid mix in 2030 had 2% geothermal, 2% biomass, 6% solar, 10% hydro, 15% nuclear, 30% wind, 20% natural gas, and 15% coal (this is extremely optimistic in all non-fossil cases). Assuming no spare capacity for geothermal, biomass, solar, hydro, or nuclear; then the act of abandoning an ICE and plugging in an EV will add some amount of energy demand to the grid which can only be satisfied by spare capacity… So the power providers will have to ramp up one of the fossil generators to provide additional energy for the new marginal demand, despite the fact that this theoretical grid is FAR cleaner than our current grid… the additional energy required by the EV will still be 100% fossil-sourced. Due to cost and system management considerations, an 8-hour long nighttime demand increase will almost certainly be satisfied by decreasing the tamp-down on coal power plants.
Grid mix is irrelevant unless and until you have EXCESS carbon-neutral energy.
Thanks, Glenn. I certainly don’t want to badger you about all this. Please don’t feel compelled to respond to this – and certainly not anytime soon; I know what you folks do there in the course of a day, and it’s considerable.
Here’s my response:
1. James Woolsey has me convinced that there are national security issues that are, in fact, unique to oil, in terms of empowering terrorism and other “bad guys.” It’s what Tom Friedman calls “Fill ‘er up with dictators,” and the “oil curse.” Where you have an autocratic state that depends for a huge share of its income on a commodity that has a lot of economic rent attached to it, that rent tends to accrue to the central power of the state. You tend not to have representative institutions like legislatures and you have a much more difficult time getting out of an autocratic structure than with a broad-based economy. Of the 22 countries that count on two-thirds or more of their national income from oil — it’s fair to say all 22 of those countries are autocratic kingdoms or dictatorships.
2. That’s very interesting, and I’m sure it’s 100% true. But I would imagine this would change when we get to significant amounts of off-shore wind, and other deployments that either move the generation closer to the load, or that implement better power transmission, e.g., the initiative to integrate the three main grids in the U.S.
3. It’s true that an EV cannot be used as both a car and a storage device simultaneously. But our cars are parked 23 ½ hours per day, generally for long periods of time, at home and at the workplace. So, yes, if EVs are going to provide a significant amount of on-peak power, we need significant numbers plugged in at that time, and that we’re a long way from that. But from what I understand, the main value of V2G is in waveform and other ancillary grid services, not power per se.
4. I’ve heard this argument, but I’m not sure I agree. Maybe I’m just dense here. Where’s the hole in this?
The US today is at 5.4 TW with essentially no EVs – about 48% of which is coal. If we suddenly plug one in at night, it will be charged, depending on where it is, with the form of energy available at that time and place. If you’re in Ohio, it’s coal; if you’re in Oregon, it’s hydro; if you’re in South Carolina, it’s nuclear. Now let’s say the US at some future date is at 7 TW, due to growth and having brought on millions of EVs. But the grid-mix is cleaner at the time the EVs are charging. It would seem that EVs charged would get cleaner power.
Again, thanks.
Craig,
I’m not really going to belabor points 1-3, but very quickly:
1. I don’t agree that the act itself of exporting oil necessarily produces dictators… (the selection criteria used here requires that a nation have only one major export… so countries like Russia, Norway, Canada, and the Netherlands are selectively excluded even though they are all in the top 12 oil exporting countries in the world (Russia is number two, delivering far more oil than any 3 ME or African nations excluding Saudi Arabia)).
2. I do agree that the grid will be changing gradually, but it’s unlikely that more that a small fraction of anyone’s grid will comprise spare wind capacity until an integration solution is developed, at which point the EV’s will again have no spare wind capacity… and that doesn’t affect the current reality that EV’s use fossil sourced energy today.
3. The cars are parked for long periods of time, but we can break this time frame up into several well understood periods: Resting for the evening, work before lunch, work after lunch, and errands. It takes roughly 8 hours to recharge a pack that can be depleted in 1 hour… so using the vehicles to balance waveform won’t work, because there would be a time delay… The power companies need storage mechanisms that can release energy between noon and 6:00 pm. The vehicles are only parked between 1:00 to ~5:00 pm (“after lunch”), and at that point they will need at least half of their charge, which would take a full 4 hours to charge… It just doesn’t work.
I am going to belabor #4, because this is important.
We’ll break this down by making a much more simplified grid, where exactly 100 GWh of energy are produced every year. Let’s say of those 100 GWh, 0.2 GWh were produced from solar, 3 GWh were produced from wind, 9 GWh were produced from hydro, 19 GWh were produced from nuclear, 43 GWh were produced from coal, and 26 GWh were produced from natural gas… But natural gas and coal were the only sources with spare capacity. Now lets add ~130 EV’s to the grid, so that the total demand is 101 GWh/yr. Since there’s no spare capacity to tap for the others, we’ll still see solar produce 0.2 GWh, wind 3 GWh, hydro 9 GWh, and nuclear 19 GWh… Meaning that now coal and natural gas will produce an average of 70 GWh rather than their previous 69 GWh…
That means that 130 EV’s, on this grid, result in 1 GWh of additional fossil-sourced electricity generation/year.
That’s pretty straightforward.
Now let’s advance this simplified grid 20 years or so, and remove the EV’s. Now it’s producing 150 GWh: 7 GWh from solar, 44 GWh from wind, 15 GWh from hydro, 23 GWh from nuclear, and 27 GWh from coal, 34 GWh from natural gas. Again, if there is no spare capacity, there is no spare capacity… so again if we add our 130 EV’s to the grid, requiring 151 GWh/year to be produced… then the total share from coal and natural gas rises to 52 GWh from 51 GWh…
So now we see that 130 EV’s on THIS extremely implausible but optimistic 2030 grid will still result in 1 GWh of fossil-sourced electricity generation/year.
Regardless of how “clean” or “dirty” the grid is, there is no change in the marginal impact of adding demand – it all must come from spare capacity, so if there’s no spare capacity that is clean, then there’s nothing other than dirty power used to provide energy for new marginal demand.
What we’re doing is different because we specifically are targeting regions that have excess clean energy, and are putting up plants to draw energy on an intermittent basis to specifically draw energy only when excess clean energy is being produced and would otherwise be curtailed… An EV owner isn’t going to move to West-Texas, but we can.
Again, thanks for all that you are doing to help alternative energy progress… but not all alternative energy platforms are equal.
The first fact is we have excess energy in the GRID that gets dumped and wasted every night. Charging Off Peak uses that waste energy with no new pollution or fuel needed. Utilities around the world can’t ramp down COAL 50%, Nuclear 20% or even hydro 10%.
The EV is the first smart GRID appliance that can use that excess with no inconvenience on the user. You don’t have to stay up until 2 am to dry your clothes or cook a meal. It’s a simple option in the EV to tell it when to charge.
The 2nd fact is an EV is much more efficient than any other vehicle. An EV even makes energy while stopping or slowing down on hills. No other vehicle can do that.
Jim,
Forgive the c/p, but I’ve already responded to the issue of efficiency:
A motor is not an engine. They don’t do the same thing, and thus cannot be compared in terms of efficiency. The motor uses electricity, which is a carrier of energy that was originally converted from coal or natural gas. The ICE in the vehicle directly converts fossil energy to mechanical energy.
In order to correctly compare the two, you have to include the efficiency of the coal power plant (~31%), then include the line losses (8-10%), the battery charging losses (~10-20%), the battery “leakage” (~1%), the battery discharge losses (~8%), and THEN the ~90-95% efficiency of the motor. There is no ICE engine made within the last decade that comes close to the horrible inefficiencies of EV’s. Nor is there an ICE vehicle that pollutes more than a similarly-sized EV (please note the caveat “similarly sized” and don’t compare the Hummer II with the Nissan Leaf).
An HEV also uses regenerative breaking, and as it is a lighter vehicle (for similar size catagory), this will result in less energy being used, and less energy being lost, within these breaking/accelerating cycles.
As for the other issue, yes tremendous amounts of energy are wasted, but that energy is wasted in very few specific regions. A person buying a car in LA, which has effectively zero waste and/or curtailed energy, will do nothing to help alleviate the excess energy problems faced by the West Texas grid at night. It just doesn’t work that way.