Grid and Bear It

 

Cars. Not so cool to educated urban younger generations. Not like what it was way back when. Expensive: purchase/lease price, insurance, maintenance, fuel and parking. Uber. Lyft. Public transportation (even in Los Angeles?!). Food delivery services. Living in the central city close to work or school and urban amenities. Plus, our infrastructure is fading and way under needed capacity, from roads and bridges to our electrical power grid. In rural areas, where distances can be significant and none of those urban transportation alternatives are available, getting that first driver’s license is a necessity as is getting that first car.

For those who still love cars and can afford them, those who like the “feel of the wheel” and the ability to go almost anywhere, that too will change. While those urban dwelling younger generations may never get driver’s licenses or, if they want to take a serious road trip, simply rent what they need (auto-guided vehicles?), who cares? But without two or three trillion dollars in infrastructure upgrades, the notion of letting drivers decide what lane to be in and when to pass someone or merge over towards a highway exit is probably a luxury we soon will no longer be able to support.

Computers guided by GPS and other external connections, with the growing penetration of on-board sensors and linked control systems, will deploy artificial intelligence to take over those driving choices, squeezing the maximum efficiency out of the infrastructure we are able to continue or expand. Foreshadowing a huge job/pay transition, driverless trucks will be hitting the highways as early as next year. It is inevitable. The transition will be interesting as older cars, with limited connectivity to that technological cutting edge, will probably be relegated to second class access on our nation’s highways and byways.

We know that coal-fired electrical power generation has been dropping like a stone, from its peak in 2007 to just over 2,000 billion kilowatt hours to 966 billion in 2019… and falling fast. No matter what politicians seeking coal-state voters may promise, we are unlikely to see many (if any) new coal-fired power plants built here ever again. Natural gas has been the big winner, because it is a fossil fuel that we have in abundance that is a lot cleaner than coal (“clean coal” generally means shoving the toxic polluted residue underground for future generations to deal with). But one way or the other, all fossil fuel has to go. Even natural gas. Reining in climate change mandates that reality.

Today, the overwhelming fuel for cars and trucks remains gasoline (sometimes with added ethanol) and diesel. Only 2.2% of cars sold in the United States are electric, but their numbers are growing. Electric motors are vastly more efficient than diesel/gasoline engines, much simpler (they do not require transmissions to apply torque) and even if they use charging stations that rely on traditional fossil fuels to generate electricity, they are cleaner. Here are some interesting numbers from a January 6^th report on CarInsurance.net.

·         Only 42% of US households can use electric vehicles. The big takeaway from these electric car industry statistics is that more people may need to change their homes if they want to go green.

·         Electric cars that run for 100,000 miles will leave a carbon footprint of only 0.96t [tons] CO2e [carbon dioxide emissions]. [Gasoline] and diesel cars running the same distance will leave 2.99t CO2e and 2.88t CO2e, respectively.

·         China has over 400,000 charging stations for electric cars. The US, on the other hand, has less than 100,000…

·         [Electric] cars are up to three times as efficient as gasoline-powered cars. This difference in performance is caused by the fact that electric motors are 90% more efficient at converting energy into motion.

 

California Governor Gavin Newsom recently issued an order – we’ll see if it holds – banning the sale of new gasoline powered vehicles by 2035. An ambitious and necessary mandate. Folks would still be able to drive gasoline powered vehicles, even buy them in other states if that is still permitted, but it’s a start. But can or will California be able to handle the concomitant increase in demand, from strain on the power grid, the need for an entirely new and vast network of rapid-charging stations to simply having enough electricity over and above what the rest of the state would otherwise have required? Recent blackouts in the state, accelerated by higher summer temperatures and a need to cut off power to areas where wildfire threats are serious, suggest we have a way to go. Will other states or the federal government follow suit?

Writing for the October 4^th Los Angeles Times, editorial writer Michael Hiltzik attempts to answer some of those questions: “Will California have enough electricity to power all those vehicles?... The short answer is yes. ‘There’s no technical or economic reason why the grid can’t support the full electrification of vehicles,’ Chris Nelder, head of the EV-Grid Integration initiative at the Rocky Mountain Institute, told me.

“The long answer is more complicated. California’s electrical capacity today wouldn’t be sufficient to provide power for 26 million EV cars and light trucks if all the vehicles in the state transitioned away from gasoline by 2035. ‘You’ll need to beef up the grid,’ Nelder says.

“Doubts about California’s ability to serve a vastly expanded fleet of electric vehicles were intensified by rolling blackouts imposed during two August days by the California Independent System Operator, or California ISO, which manages the state’s electrical grid. But experts say the rare confluence of circumstances that caused those outages doesn’t have anything to do with that issue…

“Knowing how much more electrical capacity California will have a decade or two from now is a calculation bristling with uncertainties… These include the pace of the transition away from gasoline-powered cars and the nature of the net technology: Battery-powered electric cars? Hydrogen-fueled vehicles? Or some technology as yet lurking beyond the horizon? And will EVs become more efficient over time, reducing their demand for electricity to travel given distances?

“One important variable involves the time of day when EV owners charge their vehicles. The conventional wisdom used to be that the best time was overnight, when overall electrical demand is at its lowest, for the same reason that time-of-use rate schedules are designed to encourage residents to run power-hungry washing machines and dishwashers late in the evening and early morning.”

If we keep our cars longer than expected – the limited range of EV vehicles is still a deterrence to many new car buyers – we won’t need as much electrical power, but polluted greenhouse gasses will continue to wreak their climate change damage. Home solar arrays will help. Yet we are going to have to invest a lot of money, cash that this pandemic has definitely strained, to accommodate our electrical future.

We have become a tad more efficient, however. “Electrical demand in the state has fallen in relation to population over the last decade, according to the California Energy Commission, growing by less than 2% since 2009 while the population has grown by almost 7%.

“Increases in demand at the grid level have been held down by improved efficiency in electric equipment and appliances and the growth of ‘behind-the-meter’ solar — that is, residential installations, says Erica Bowman, director of resource and environmental planning and strategy at Southern California Edison… That trend will fade over time, however, as efficiency gains top out and demand rises from EVs and the increased electrification of homes and commercial and industrial buildings.

“But demand will ramp up slowly at first. ‘We’re not seeing a huge increase in load by 2030,’ Bowman told me — even though the utility projects that EV ownership will rise to about 7.5 million vehicles, or about 25% of the state’s stock, based on expectations that about two-thirds of new-vehicle sales will be EVs by then.

“By 2045, she says, Edison expects a 60% increase in demand relative to today. That requires a massive investment in infrastructure. ‘You would have to build more generation, and you would also have to build more [transmission] capacity on your grid.’… Edison projects that the necessary change would require about $75 billion in transmission and distribution investment at California ISO’s level, but Bowman says that’s doable in that time frame.” Hiltzik. Doable because we must.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and even with this political and pandemic maelstrom, there are clear policy changes that our future elected officials must face if we are to have a shot of preserving global habitability.