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If you divide the 2021 number by the population of California you get ~7 MWh per year per capita of which only ~ 5 MWh is generated from inside the state.
2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 RWD (Long Range) EPA estimate 30 kWh/100 mi or 4.50 MWh to drive 15,000 miles in a year (30x150/1000)
2022 Ford F-150 Lightning Platinum 4WD EPA estimate 51 kWh/100 mi or 7.65 MWh to drive 15,000 miles in a year (51x150/1000)
Obviously California is going to have to produce more electricity to support millions of EVs.
In contrast Wyoming generates ~30 MWh per capita per year so there is more than enough electricity to power a fleet of EVs, but they are a lot less effective in reducing greenhouse gases since Wyoming is primarily using the coal in the Powder River Basin which is going to last for centuries.
Yes, WV, KY, WY and MO have the largest percentage of electricity generation from coal - all greater than 67%. UT, ND, NE, and IN are all over 50%. On the other hand, you have CA, CT, ID, ME, MA, NH, NY, RI, and VT all generate less than 1% of their electricity from coal. https://www.nei.org/resources/statis...on-fuel-shares
Yes, WV, KY, WY and MO have the largest percentage of electricity generation from coal - all greater than 67%. UT, ND, NE, and IN are all over 50%. On the other hand, you have CA, CT, ID, ME, MA, NH, NY, RI, and VT all generate less than 1% of their electricity from coal.
There are only 3 Nuclear generation plants in the Western interconnect.
28.2% Arizona - Palo Verde Generating Station
8.3% Washington - Columbia Generating Station
8.0% California - Diablo Canyon Power Plant
0.0% Montana
0.0% Wyoming
0.0% Idaho
0.0% Colorado
0.0% New Mexico
0.0% Oregon
0.0% Utah
0.0% Nevada
California is going to close Diablo Canyon by 2025. Washington's nuclear generation plant is to physically far from California to sell them power, but the Arizona plant, Palo Verde, is only ~100 miles from the CA|AZ border and is partially owned by
Southern California Edison (15.8%),
Southern California Public Power Authority (5.9%),
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (5.7%)
By 2045 it will be illegal (under current state law) to use nuclear power in California even if it is imported from another state.
Throughout its history, the U.S. nuclear laboratory at Idaho Falls (presently known as the Idaho National Laboratory or “INL”) has been home to 52 nuclear reactors, the largest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world. It will be the home to the new experimental six small modular nuclear reactors which will allow future reactors to be built in factories and shipped to their final destination, hopefully thus massively reducing the cost of new reactors.
It is possible to add nuclear and hydrodynamic power to California's list of "renewable resources" before the law takes effect in 2045, but it seems unlikely they will be added to the list in the next decade. Only if it looks as if California cannot achieve it's legally mandated goals are they likely to add those options.
The Mountain states in the Western Interconnect are heavy users of Coal (2019%).
83.9% Wyoming
64.5% Utah
50.7% Montana
44.9% Colorado
41.8% New Mexico
20.5% Arizona
6.9% Nevada
6.7% Washington
4.1% Oregon
0.1% Idaho
0.1% California
The Western Interconnect is generally very heavy users of Natural Gas (2019%)
64.6% Nevada
42.5% California
40.5% Arizona
33.6% New Mexico
33.6% Oregon
30.3% Colorado
24.0% Utah
23.2% Idaho
14.8% Washington
2.4% Wyoming
1.8% Montana
Last edited by PacoMartin; 05-08-2022 at 11:09 AM..
No these electric vehicles cost too much at initial time of purchase. If the prices come down like most things do maybe.
But even the prices of regular vehicles are going up and up just like real estate. So one will either purchase still or rent. In cars people will lease since regular petrol cars pricing has gone up already. Leasing because of lower payments Will never had the pride of ownership but always have the lastest and greatest so called technology.
No these electric vehicles cost too much at initial time of purchase. If the prices come down like most things do maybe.
But even the prices of regular vehicles are going up and up just like real estate. So one will either purchase still or rent. In cars people will lease since regular petrol cars pricing has gone up already. Leasing because of lower payments Will never had the pride of ownership but always have the lastest and greatest so called technology.
I don't know since college graduates this year think their starting salaries are going to be over $100,000 they can certainly afford things.
Yes, WV, KY, WY and MO have the largest percentage of electricity generation from coal - all greater than 67%. UT, ND, NE, and IN are all over 50%. On the other hand, you have CA, CT, ID, ME, MA, NH, NY, RI, and VT all generate less than 1% of their electricity from coal. https://www.nei.org/resources/statis...on-fuel-shares
Wyoming only has 400+ something charging stations available and are resistant to change over to EV.
They want to install more charging stations to encourage more tourism.
I have been dealing with the technology involved for over 50 years.
And my opinion is that it will be well worth the hassle,. I will likely not be here but in 20 years you will all look back and smile.
Me too. I was hoping my State wouldn't take away our heritage and what makes us different until the EV's were safe and affordable enough to buy no longer need any oil or gas. Really what good is electric if we have to still add gas and oil to it.
Last edited by staystill; 05-08-2022 at 04:29 PM..
Reason: gas and oil added
No these electric vehicles cost too much at initial time of purchase.
In discussing Subaru MSRP for all 45 trims of all 8 models, the EV trims are the three of the four highest priced in the top four.
I figure the lowest priced Subaru EV trim is $16,100 over its gasoline counterpart. The "Premium" trim is very popular for Subaru as it is one step above base model and has the options that consumers most prefer. Higher trims are designated "sport", "limited" and "touring".
$44,995 Solterra Premium EV (bZ4x all wheel drive is Toyota sister car)
$27,995 BRZ Premium 2 door sports car (GR86 is Toyota sister car)
$25,745 Legacy Premium Sedan (Midsize)
$25,645 Crosstrek Premium 5seat SUV with CVT
$23,195 Impreza Premium 5-door hatchback
$22,695 Impreza Premium Sedan
Note that all Subaru models with power 182 hp or less have a Premium trim MSRP starting under $30,000. Exceptions are the WRX and the Ascent which require power of 260 hp or more. Subaru sees itself as providing the best value gasoline AWD vehicles in America. The Solterra delivers 215 horsepower and 249 pound-feet of torque and an EPA-rated 228 miles of range in Premium trim. Those specs are hardly earthshaking so most people were hoping for a lower MSRP. The Solterra is even $1000 higher than the equivalent Toyota bZ4x all wheel drive.
One advocate responded that $16,100 was reasonable as he expected to save $2000 per year on gasoline compared to electricity costs, and he expected to save thousands on transmission repairs. spark plug replacements, timing belt, oil changes, and additional costs uniquely associated with the internal combustion engine.
Over 6 years he expected to make up the difference in upfront costs.
MT meands standard is Manual Transmission and CVT is an option at price indicated
In discussing Subaru MSRP for all 45 trims of all 8 models, the EV trims are the three of the four highest priced (with only the most expensive trim of gasoline powered 7 passenger SUV, the Ascent Touring in the top four. Most people were hoping for a lower MSRP as it is even $1000 higher than the equivalent Toyota bZ4x all wheel drive.
I figure the lowest priced Subaru EV trim is $16,100 over its gasoline counterpart. The "Premium" trim is very popular for Subaru as it is one step above base model and has the options that consumers most prefer. Higher trims are designated "sport", "limited" and "touring".
$44,995 Solterra Premium EV (bZ4x all wheel drive is Toyota sister car)
$27,995 BRZ Premium 2 door sports car (GR86 is Toyota sister car)
$25,745 Legacy Premium Sedan (Midsize)
$25,645 Crosstrek Premium 5seat SUV with CVT
$23,195 Impreza Premium 5-door hatchback
$22,695 Impreza Premium Sedan
One person responded that $16,100 was reasonable as he expected to save $2000 per year on gasoline compared to electricity costs, and he expected to save thousands on transmission repairs. spark plug replacements, timing belt, oil changes, and additional costs uniquely associated with the internal combustion engine.
Over 6 years he expected to make up the difference in upfront costs.
MT meands standard is Manual Transmission and CVT is an option at price indicated
These are the MSRP for Subaru's 5seat SUVs at the same trim level. The EV is $15,000 to $16,000 higher priced than the equivalent size gasoline version.
$44,995 Solterra Premium 5seat SUV EV
$29,845 Outback Premium 5seat SUV
$28,895 Forester Premium 5seat SUV
$24,295 Crosstrek Premium 5seat SUV
But if it saves you $2000 a year in fuel costs, and thousands in maintenance costs unique to an internal combustion engine, is it worth the higher monthly payment especially given the $7500 tax credit? Are we delusional in thinking we will see the EV version come down in price to the gasoline version in our lifetime?
We're sort of retreading ground from earlier in the topic, which is understandable given its length, and I think my take on this is still the same. Some points that have resurfaced I'd like to mention again are:
- Electricity production is not the limiting factor here nor will it be in the near future.
On the demand side, the needed growth for a transition to 50% EV new vehicle sales by 2030 isn't that large in terms of additional consumption, generation capacity, transmission capacity or distribution. The median age of the US fleet is about twelve years old at this point and the most recent quarter puts us at probably ~6 or 7% plugins for new vehicle market share. Even if it was an even growth to 50% to new vehicle market share from this previous quarter to the 2030 which I think is unlikely to be the pace of adoption given how adoption rates have been in other countries (they start with a low base and accelerate), that would still be a very small turnover of the existing vehicle fleet overall and a fairly low amount of additional consumption from EVs needed per year. I did earlier back of the envelope calculations on what the total demand is based on average annual miles driven per vehicle per year with transmission and inverter loss and average efficiency (which may plateau and decrease a bit for the next few years because of the uptake of far larger vehicles being on sale and then increase again as the market balances out and technologies improve) and it's a very modest total demand uptake. Moreover, there are a lot of other tools in terms of optimizing behavior given existing generation and distribution capacity peaks such as via time-of-use or the deployment of distributed stationary storage which means that the actual needed improvements might be even lower than what the raw percentage increase of consumption may indicate.
On the supply side of things, you can look to previous US history of additional generation capacity and how quickly it was able to add capacity *when there is the demand for such*. In the previous recent decades, demand has leveled off and so little new net generation capacity has been added even as power plants have retired and new ones have come online usually to just replace existing capacity rather than add net total generation. If there is new demand though, there is little indication that market forces would simply be unwilling to address that demand as they would both likely want to increase business and profits and at the same time not like for their businesses to be threatened by governments on the local, state and federal level for not having adequately supplied what is now a fairly essential service. One of the main things to consider is that on the physical and economic level, there is no real capacity constraint as electricity can be generated from a very wide array of tried and true methods with recent PPAs for solar being among the lowest cost electricity ever. Even if for some reason we needed to turn to petroleum for electricity generation, the miles of personal vehicle travel compared to the closest equivalent ICE vehicle will still be greater per barrel of petroleum in a combined cycle generation plant after transmission and distribution loss than it would be for after refinement and distribution to the relatively inefficient ICE vehicle so at the very baseline, this is not an issue since even on that even footing there's a greater yield for the EV and the EV can get electricity generated from a far greater number of sources. What's more, there are multiple other countries further ahead on the EV adoption curve and have been able to manage the demand increase just fine.
- Not everyone has an easy pathway to charge at home, what will people like apartment dwellers without dedicated parking do?
That's certainly true, but the topic was about 50% of new vehicle market share not 100%. Not even 90%. 50% is pretty well in line with how many households that *do* currently have an easy pathway to having charging at home. It's also likely that those with home ownership that allows for such are skewed towards people who have the kind of wealth and income to buy or lease new vehicles in the first place. That by itself should settle this question since we're talking about 50% new vehicle market share in 2030. However, on top of that is that given what we've seen in improvements to battery electric vehicles over the last eight years and battery improvements over the last several decades, and there being no indication those improvements coming to a rapid halt, it's likely that a sizable proportion of even those without that pathway to charging at home are able to live comfortably with a new electric vehicle purchased in 2030. That's because range, charging times, and availability of chargers are improving at a rapid rate so there has been a steadily larger proportion of people without charging at home that have usage patterns that can work fine. There was mentioned the example of someone looking at a new likely premium EV purchase who did not have dedicated charging at home, but also did not have a daily commute and potentially had the availability of charging at home parking that would be occasionally available. Even now, there are vehicles for people with larger budgets for premium vehicles that can do fine with such since a single charge event whether it's at a DC fast charger at a shopping center/retail outlet or an overnight charge if able to find it on a long range vehicle for someone without a daily commute means taking almost no additional time out of their lives if that single charge event meant several days and potentially weeks of usage.
- Cold weather and their impact on EV range
How cold of cold weather? -40F? Sure. -60F? Definitely. However, that's not the climate most people in the US live in as the vast majority of the US lives outside of interior and northern Alaska and it's unlikely that in 2030 that will have changed so much that 50% of new vehicle purchases within the US take place in interior or northern Alaska. I think part of why this keeps persisting as a talking point are a holdover from electric vehicles of several years to a decade ago. Back then, battery capacities for EVs were generally much smaller and estimated ranges were far smaller. This meant that needing several kWhs of charge to warm up an EV's interior essentially put range of those EVs even if starting at fully charged into the low dozens of miles of range. This is no longer the case for any of the better selling EVs of today (yea, there are some clunkers still being released like the Mazda MX-30 that was recently released, but almost no one is buying that). Keep in mind that the first generation Nissan Leaf debuted with a 24 kWh battery pack and at an inflation-adjusted price about equivalent to the base Hyundai Ioniq 5 with a 77.4 kWh battery pack. Let's say the Nissan Leaf takes 8 kWh to warm up the cabin from a freezing temperature--that 8 kWh is a full third of the capacity and range and almost makes it optimistic 73 mile range into something far lower and pretty hairy in a lot of situations. For an Ioniq 5 though, it's a minor inconvenience. As battery capacities keep going up on average and as things like heat pumps geared towards far colder weather become standard and more efficient, this mostly non-issue for most is going to be by 2030 a non-issue for almost everyone.
- How much lithium and other raw materials for batteries and motors are available for a full transition?
Lithium is a weird one to say we're running out of because it's very abundant compared to the amount needed per vehicle and total number of vehicles. There may be far larger industries for lithium and other battery and motor materials in China, but that's mostly because they invested in those industries in terms of manufacturing capacity and knowhow and not a raw resource advantage China actually has. We are nowhere close to hitting a limit on actual raw extract-able supply of these resources and price increases in raw commodity have also meant that what were formerly unthinkably expensive processes for recycling these materials (these are not consumables in the way that petroleum is and a dead battery still has all the raw materials that were there the day you bought it) are now profitable and will likely remain so for a while. Additionally, part of battery improvements has been even fewer amounts of materials have been needed for the same given battery capacity so any vehicle's battery on the road now when recycled for reuse will likely yield substantially more capacity than it does in its current form. What's more, for the US specifically, there is likely to be a greater allocation of EVs towards the major European and Chinese markets than there are to the US market and we're already seeing that with things like how Ford has allocated its Mach E production. On top of that, the US market isn't slated to get most of the more affordable electric vehicles that European and Chinese markets get and that's not likely to change.
^This one though at least gets close to what I think is the most reasonable argument against there being 50% EV new vehicle market share in the US by 2030 though I do think it will still happen. While the raw materials themselves aren't a limiting factor in abstract to get total fleet replacement, production capacity and pipelines are somewhat limited in the sense that it takes time to set up the pipeline for new material and it's pretty apparent that EV adoption rates have taken some by surprise including major industry players such as Toyota. This likely means that at least in the next couple of years and possibly longer, there's going to be a lot of bidding on the production capacity that is available during that period and raise prices as it's likely that production pipeline constraint is greater than what battery improvements make it into manufacturing in that time period that would improve the kWh yield per amount of material. However long that's extended would also delay adoption rates as it's not the capability of EVs that are the main issue for most people, but the high initial purchase price. That was on a fairly good downward trend in terms of what one can get for the price compared to the closest equivalent ICE vehicle. I think that trend will overall continue over the decade, but there's quite possibly a sizable blip in the next couple of years in battery prices due to that aforementioned production pipeline constraint relative to rapidly growing global demand.
---
Anyhow, it's also probably a good time to again mention the links between various factors of an EV and why they've improved as quickly as they have compared to ICE vehicles. At the core of this has been battery improvements. Batteries have been improving at an exponential rate for several decades with a doubling of energy density almost every decade (it varies a bit from a bit under to a few years over a decade) and a lot of that seems to be tied towards increasing market demand for batteries with them becoming cheaper with every kWh of capacity produced. In the 90s and 00s, a lot of that boom in demand was from consumer electronics going into laptops and phones which aren't a lot of capacity by themselves, but sold in large volumes. This got battery cells with decent capacity to a price level that was doable for premium electric vehicles starting with the Tesla Roadster where it's not accidental that its battery packs were essentially large banks of the kind of battery cells used in laptop computers. As more EVs were produced and a larger market was created, battery improvements continued throughout the 2010s and with several traits that essentially helped each other. Greater energy density in these batteries meant generally less material was used per kWh of capacity which meant lower prices, lesser weight, and smaller footprint for any given kWh of capacity.
This meant that vehicles could stuff more and more capacity into EVs for any given price, weight, and footprint. With more capacity generally comes greater max safe charging and discharging rates. Higher charging rates are good for charging the vehicle when plugged in as well as allowing for greater regenerative braking capacity so more energy is recovered from braking. Higher discharge rates meant that more power can be supplied to motors which is why so many EVs have such stellar performance numbers for their class (and motors have a lot of power density for relatively low prices so if the increasingly large batteries have increasingly high max discharge rates, then you might as well put in more powerful or more motors). As more battery capacity is available, things like cold temperature issues become steadily more minor issues because the amount of energy needed to heat a particular volume of air and its occupants in the cabin doesn't increase with greater battery capacity so the proportion of battery capacity needed to warm it becomes lower and lower compared to the total pack size. These all go hand in hand at least for this first part of mass market EV improvements.
The second part of EV mass market EV improvements is going to be when EVs hit ranges and fast charging times where most consumers feel are adequate and loading more and more capacity get diminishing returns on sales volume. This is when battery improvements increasingly start slanting towards other factors including lower weights and volumes/footprints rather than increasing capacity. As this starts happening, vehicle range and even capacity can also still increase, but more of the range increase will be due to having less battery weight both directly in terms of the battery itself and indirectly in terms of material needed to support such battery weight. As that happens, the vehicles likely become cheaper (or competitive in cheaper segments), the amount of miles yielded for every minute of charging at any given charging rate increases and thus even cheaper to refuel and a lesser strain per mile on the grid, even greater design and packaging flexibility becomes available, and may even allow for oddities like solar panels embedded into the vehicles to actually be somewhat useful. To some degree, this second part has started to happen with the newly refreshed Tesla Model S/X which have lighter battery packs and greater ranges than their predecessors.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 05-09-2022 at 03:55 PM..
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Will never had the pride of ownership but always have the lastest and greatest so called technology.
