Electric Vehicle sales exceeding expectations

Will the grid be able to keep up?

 

Unlikely. Massive upgrades are needed to transmission lines and infrastructure to handle the load. I know out west the DoE is working on alot of projects to beef it up, but its going to take alot of investment to move all that energy from gas vehicles to the grid.

 

We have time

 

Already rolling brown outs in North Carolina this year. No nukes, wind and solar to unreliable, I'm afraid this will not end well, without a lot of unneeded pain and suffering.

 

Unneeded, I agree. However, I think increased EV adoption will force us out of stagnation/complacency with our power grids.

Interestingly, having an EV when you lose power is great. My parent’s house lost power over the holidays and we were able to plug in almost anything we wanted into the EV6 in the garage. It comes with a V2L adapter allowing you to run an extension cord from its charge port.

 

Try living here in southern California. The system is a total mess.
Seriously, our grid might just catch on fire before your Tesla does.
And who can afford to replace a $20-$30k battery every 5-7 years?

 

This is you right now:

 

Strangely, the day that they had rolling blackouts, it was because the temperature dipped into single digits with a high wind and the equipment at a natural gas plant and two coal plants froze when the neighboring states had similar temperature drops and wind issues. But you chose to blame the lack of nuclear (North Carolina has 3 nuclear power stations in state and draws from a 4th in South Carolina) and wind and solar rather than their reliance on natural gas and coal.

https://ncpolicywatch.com/2023/01/0...-eve-utility-officials-tell-state-regulators/

 

I'm not a relic from the past in my thinking for the record.
But hybrid or hydrogen-powered cars make much more sense.

 

I'd love to hear how hydrogen cars make sense.

Talk about infrastructure.

 

I blame the fact that we do not produce enough electricity by any means and do not have a grid capable of handling what is and will be needed as this shift to EV's ramps up. I don't rely on the fact that these concerns will be addressed before there will be an abundant unneeded pain and suffering. Just look at the rest of our crumbling infrastructure. I wasn't trying to imply that NC had no nukes, just that if we want to really address the energy issue it has to be a bigger part. And we have to have a more reliable and efficient way to capture the energy produced from wind and solar.

 

The most abundant element on Earth
Molecular hydrogen is a gas. As a chemical element, hydrogen is the most common element on Earth.
And it contains a lot of chemical energy.

If you ignite hydrogen it will react with the oxygen in the air. It releases its energy by means of an explosion. But instead of an uncontrolled explosion, we can harness this energy safely within a hydrogen fuel cell. It’s the fuel cell that powers hydrogen cars.

7 Best Hydrogen Cars 2022-2023

• 1.) Toyota Mirai The Toyota Mirai is a mid-sized hydrogen car. It’s one of the first FCVs that were available on the market. ...
• 2.) Hyundai Nexo Hyundai Nexo is an SUV, and it was revealed in 2018 for the first time. ...
• 3.) Honda Clarity Fuel Cell ...
• 4.) Hyperion XP1 ...
• 5.) BMW i Hydrogen NEXT ...
• 6.) Hyundai FE Fuel Cell Concept ...
• 7.) Chevrolet Colorado ZH2 ...

How do hydrogen-powered cars work?

 

How does a hydrogen-powered vehicle actually work?
The fuel cell is a device that takes chemical energy, in the form of hydrogen, and turns it into electricity that can power an electric motor, just like a battery. So, a hydrogen-powered car is powered with an electric motor.
How does it work? First, hydrogen stored in a tank (that is thick-walled and crash-tested, and usually under the rear seat) is mixed with air and pumped into the fuel cell. Inside the cell, a chemical reaction extracts electrons from the hydrogen.

The leftover hydrogen protons move across the cell and combine with oxygen from the air to produce water. Meanwhile the electrons create electricity, which charges a small storage battery used to power an electric drivetrain (just like in an electric vehicle). This is why the vehicles are called Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV), as compared to the battery electric vehicles (BEV) which are seen increasingly on our roads already.

The biggest difference between FCEV and BEVs (like the Tesla car) is the source of electricity. Electric cars run on batteries charged electrically (even from solar panels). But hydrogen-powered cars produce their own electricity. They have their little power plant on board – that’s the fuel cell.

So, unlike a combustion engine, which produces carbon dioxide, the only end products of this hydrogen-powered reaction are electricity, water and heat. The only exhaust products are water vapour and warm air.

 

Uh, thanks? I understand quite well how they work, and if you understood you'd know why car manufacturers have given up on Hydrogen. Hint: it doesn't make sense. But if you know a way to make them a better option than BEVs me and everyone in the world would love to hear it.

 

Large scale nuclear makes no sense from a financial perspective as wind and solar have become much cheaper to produce. It makes the most sense financially to invest in those sources, utilizing their natural negative correlation, and build enough capacity to deal with systemic risks. If nuclear has a technological advancement that makes it cheaper, as is often speculated but has thus far not been commercially delivered, then it could make sense to take another look at nuclear.

 

I don't know the actual true answer to this, so I will ask. With where we get, and the environmental impact of producing all the components for wind and solar production, ie panels, blades, storage batteries, etc., how long does it take for the actual environmental impact be a positive rather than a negative? I'm asking from serious standpoint; things have been reported that as much as 30-40 years. I really do not know and would like to have a better insight into the reality of that. I have read that it takes a minimum of 20 years for an EV to have a net positive environmental impact compared to an ICE vehicle.

 

You should never again trust the source that told you 20+ years.

While I'm not saying this is hard fact, it's certainly much closer to reality and unbiased: 13,500 miles till green.

 

It isn't like nuclear, coal, and natural gas plants are naturally occurring. We have to produce all the components for those plants as well. Nuclear is massively expensive and resource intensive to construct. Fuel driven plants are a little less so, but transportation and extraction of fuels makes them have much higher environmental impact than even just from direct emissions. Even the most aggressive models have suggested that solar breaks even in a couple of years, and those models often leave off emissions associated with other forms of plants.

Analysis: When do electric vehicles become cleaner than gasoline cars?

It is highly dependent on the modeling assumptions and how power is produced. This model suggests somewhere before 14K miles in the US but higher in places with more coal power (e.g. 78K in China) and lower in places with less fossil fuel power (e.g. 8K in Norway). But even the craziest high end models now have been revised downward, with the one listed in this story (that hit right wing media heavily under its initial findings) now at 42K-93K miles, a range in which a customer would drive in far less than 20 years unless you drove very lightly.