carguy123 wrote:
Well manufacturing and recycling nightmares and costs aside, plugging your car in only shifts the pollutants from your backyard to someone else's back yard. The electricity doesn't just appear, it has to be generated.
It's been said many times before: not all electricity is generated with huge polluting coal plants, and, it's easier to regulate and keep clean one central source than millions of independent point sources.
In many areas, new smart meters are being put on homes and businesses showing not only how much electricity was used, but when. By encouraging people to use off -peak electricity (by charging less for off-peak hours) you get a situation where electric cars get plugged in at night when people are home, using off-peak hours, making the electric plants more efficient by not being ramped down at night and up in the morning. And using off peak hours could allow for enough electrical generation capacity to convert the entire automotive fleet over. Considering we're not talking about converting the entire automotive fleet over for a long time, there's MORE THAN ENOUGH excess capacity, along with zero increase in electric plant pollution (which is being reduced even in the worst offenders as we speak).
"Here's the math in California, which has the figures readily available, and which consumes 12% of the country's gasoline: California uses 280 million gallons of gasoline per week. At the fleet average of 20 miles per gallon ("mpg"), that's 5,600 million miles per week. On an average day, Californians drive 800 million miles burning fuel derived from petroleum.
The RAV4-EV-not even the most efficient EV-gets four miles for each kilowatt-hour ("kWh") of energy it holds. Dividing 800 million daily miles by four miles per kWh means we would need 200 million kWh to convert all miles driven in gasoline-fueled cars to miles powered by electric RAV4-EVs or other, even more efficient electric vehicles.
In California, our installed capacity is 60,000 megawatts and off-peak unused capacity is about 30,000 megawatts for 18 hours (integrating under the curve on the state website, caiso.com), or about 540,000 megawatt-hours. That's 540 million kWh of unused electric capacity per day.
That's more than the 200 million kWh per day it would take to convert ALL oil-fueled miles to electric-powered miles, by a substantial margin, and without building one new power plant."
Think about it. The NE actually has that sort of extra capacity built in now, too.
MW loads on the system generally fall by 25-50% every night which causes plants to go offline and otherplants who can't cycle that quickly to reduce loads and run more unefficiently because of the fact that the power generated must equal the power consumed as little to no pawer gets stored on the grid....
Here's some data from most of the east coast during a hot summer day (95 degrees in my neck of the woods) this year which shows the system loads... PJM (largest grid controller in the world) peaked at around 50,000 MW which is about 30% of their max capacity (which they peaked at over 130,000MW if i remember correctly a couple years ago) and the load dropped to 30-35,000 MW that night despite everyone still having their air conditioners on
ftp://ftp.pjm.com/pub/market_system_data/system/hourly_prelim_loads/daily/20080719_dailyload.csv
