Thursday
May282015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Greens trashing the environment part 527
May 28, 2015 Energy: electric cars Greens How can one resist posting a video of Tesla electric cars being recharged (so it is claimed) using a diesel generator?
These people love the environment you see.
Reader Comments (62)
SandyS,
Agreed. The only change I would suggest would be:
"Battery from flat to 85kWh fully charged, say 20 million charges is 1700 GWh by my reckoning, over a 10 hour period (20:00 -> 06:00) is 170GW
per hourof powerplant capacity running full load all night."About 170 large powerplants.
Wijnand
Yes the base load running at night is not used since it cannot be stored feasibly. Hence it is wasted. It is required because you cannot just shut down power stations willy nilly - especially nuclear stations which pretty much run at the same load all the time (but then the fuel is much cheaper so its ok). Of course if we are shutting all the coal and nuclear plants by 2023 then who knows what we'll do. We may by that time have to buy our own home generators anyway or maybe we'll just have to move to Spain for the Winter - we are talking a very long time in the future - who knows anything?
SandyS
The unit is GW or GJ/s. And yes there is probably enough to cope if load balancing is done bearing in mind many charges will not be full charges of course since most folk don't travel 200 miles every day. However this is something that will clearly not be introduced to the system all at once.
James
I highly doubt that anyone who earned nothing and owed no tax would be buying a Tesla or indeed any car so it is a distinction without a difference. Anyway they are phasing that tax credit out in the very near future.
Rob/Jamesp
You are bloviating based on zero reading of the subject. Clever folk have bothered to study this you know. They may disagree but they don't just make things up after roughly 5 minutes biased aforethought. And uptake will be very slow. But hey what happens with all that oil that isn't being used on cars? Enviros may be optimistic about EV's being net green but they are at least partly right.
"Clever folk have bothered to study this you know."
So you keep saying, but you keep forgetting to tell us who they are, or what they have actually said!
My 'bloviating' is based on empirical calculations and fairly detailed knowledge of my own electricity consumption, happily corroborated by Rob! You seem to be forgetting that the grid in the UK is only being kept from collapse by diesel generators, largely thanks to interference from enviros who never seem to think things through.
I've no objection to EV's per se, but their promotion as 'zero emission' vehicles does grate and I strongly suspect that they will be worth nothing second-hand when their batteries wear out. Would you buy one if power cuts became a regular occurrence?
"Yes the base load running at night is not used since it cannot be stored feasibly. Hence it is wasted."
Would You please explain how this is accomplished? Power doesn't just disappear You know. Do you have a huge heating coil in the ocean that you dump the power to?
"a huge heating coil in the ocean"
At last - the missing heat! :-)
' Clever folk have
bothered to study this you know.'
Eh! you don't need to clever to know how much energy is needed to power a car. To power an all electric fleet if cars requires a huge increase in our electrical power generation.
"We may by that time have to buy our own home generators"
Very likely, and it will at least bring home to people that EV's have to be powered from somewhere. I did find a nice 9.5kW genset for under £3000, but it needed refuelling every 6 hours.
Paulus and Gary for the sake of the reputation of this blog can we get the units right? Energy is measured in KWh not KW per Hour. Sandy S the grid would need to be producing 170 GW not 170 GW per hour in your example.
JamesG,
Would you disagree with a statement if we all used electric cars (well I can't drive) that we could see 10 million concurrent charges pulling 13KW? That would need 130GW of power using my add it up in my head technique. A car uses a lot of energy to run, It shows how useful oil is as a fuel.
Anthony Hanwell
I noticed the units were wrong after I posted and there doesn't appear to be any way of editing. Unfortunately I copied what Paulus had put without thinking.
Elephant in the Room is "Do you want to look after the POUNDS or the PENNIES ?"
- why talk about consumer vehicles which basically are parked 95% of the time as they are mostly used for comuuting
..and not talk about the real heavy generators of transport CO2 the much larger and intensive commercial vehicles, buses, lorries which are operating many hours out of each 24 ??
- Same for Googles driverless car guff, why talk about consumer vehicles when driverless commercial vehicles is where HIGH utility would be ?? Imagine a whole army of mining trucks in a remote Australian mine which could drive themselves onsite 24/7 ..and perhaps drive thousands of km across the desert ..so there would not be the same human safety issues you'd get in central London.
- The @ JamesG vs @James $7,500 EV subsidy point The subsidy point .. tax breaks can be considered subsidies if they apply to one product but not it's competitors.
#2 Two wrongs don't make a right, but you can't count third world countries vote buying by subsidizing fossil fuels, without counting similar subsidies they give on electricity.
#3 BTW of course in such cases fossil fuels get a higher count
..They get giga subsdies cos they supply gigawatts
..and generating 1/1000 less power would generate megasubsidy payments ...ie even if those countries have solar/wind power it is so CRAP at generating volume of power it ends up getting a lower dollar count.
- PROPER cost benefit anaysis is important for government spending ..so for EVs how much CO2 is saved for each $subsidy ..or as we suspect do EVs end up generating more CO2 if dull life cycle is included.
Pricee2 | MARCH 11, 2015on a Tesla foum
"When Harris Ranch went down Tesla brought in generators until the utility problem was resolved. Not sure how long the outage was until the generators were online. In the meantime they flat bedded the cars to other chargers."
BTW One of China's Hanergy directors has been jailed on 2 out of 3 counts of rape and sexual assault
oops I missed the question marks ...been typing too fast
- PROPER cost benefit anaysis is important for government spending
..so for EVs how much CO2 is saved for each $subsidy ?
..or as we suspect do EVs end up generating more CO2 if dull life cycle is included ?
Of course I am taking Edward Niedermeyer as honest,. The video doesn't have the diesel generator sound so it is not proof, but Edward Niedermeyer
asserted that the cars were being charged by the diesel "Moreover, several Tesla customers were observed charging from the noisy, carbon-emitting backup generator even when the standard Supercharging station had numerous plugs available. "
I mentioned the March 22 post but it seems it's NOT THE SAME generator..again Edward Niedermeyer
documents the different generators being delivered and switch on times. and his twitter photos show Tesla workers operating them.
Actually sure it's better Tesla use diesel generators rather than promise customers a super recharge station , and then let them down ?
The battery swap is named as a scam at 1:12.30 of this video
Well what is Tesla's response to the 2 allegations..I want to hear them..I haven't found anything yet on Twitter
over on the Tesla Forum they just call the skeptics liars as 1or 2 claim they have swapped batteries but the info is pretty minimal. They claim you have to pay $80 for the process of renting a battery and then another time reswapping it for your original battery and that a sled installation is involved.
"the first time takes longer because they need to install a battery sled for future visits."
That implies to me that the cars as sold are not swap ready.