Futures market??
Then again, it could be tulips.
Me? I drive a nice big SUV.
It has been a very good day for Tesla, after its CEO reports the firm took orders for over 196,000 new Model 3 electric cars. Thought it would slow way down today, but Model 3 order count is now at 198k. Recommend ordering soon, as the wait time is growing rapidly. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 1, 2016 The new car went on …
"it's like saying the ferrari F12 berlinetta is one hell of a car, so this fiat 500 must be great too."
Not sure what you are trying to imply there as the Fiat 500 is a great car for what it is designed to do. Whilst I wouldn't want to take one anywhere near a motorway, they probably have the Ferrari licked for a day-to-day town-center commute or shopping trip.
Whilst I agree that the quality of previous Tesla cars doesn't necessarily mean that the new one will be as amazing, they have done enough impressive stuff to deserve a little faith.
But surely the appeal of a Tesla
is that it is an electric car, so laughing at petrol prices
is that Musk has had a pretty good string of great ideas
is that it is affordable for an electric car, in a company that has built an electric from the ground up, instead of bolting on the electrics to a petrol-burner model
is that they have been reasonably customer-focused, fixing problems fairly quickly as they arose
The general idea is that you fit one if you get an electric car. If you have street parking, some councils are looking at fitting sockets to lamp posts and setting up dedicated EV spaces. The other option, that some people do currently with their Tesla, is using Superchargers exclusively.
"...fitting sockets to lamp posts..."
Do the cables lock in at both ends? Otherwise somebody (everybody) will just unplug all the e-cars because it's funny. Find your car has a range of "7" in the morning.
They'll take off with the cable if it's not tied down. If it's heavy copper, well - copper thieves.
Has anyone thought this through yet?
I know right. My new house is an older one with just 2 plug outlets in the bedroom.. One for bedside lamp and one for electric blanket.
But I want to run my clock, charger for my phone, and a TV. One day I'll get a house with those plugs. Till the it'll have to do without.
Actually, I'd wager that even stronger statement, such as "No country in the world has got the capacity...", is true.
However, Teslas, Nissan Leafs etc. are only a miniscule percentage of total car numbers, so grids will have a few decades to adapt. In infrastructure terms this isn't a lot though - Germans for example adopted abruptly their Energiewende in 2010 and in 2016 there is almost zero progress in critical north-south power network extension to accomodate massive influx of energy from northern wind parks. And from the "Go" it will take additional ten, fifteen years to actually build something useful. Also, I don't believe that actually anyone understands in full what it means to have really massive increase in electric power consumption. Smart grid demos are always nice, but in practice they don't work (yet).
Electric cars however, have to overcome additional ideological issue (at least for the time being) - they don't produce exhalations directly, but electricity they use is supplied largely by burning carbon fuels, such as coal and natural gas. In California for example, such sources comprise over 50% of power mix (according to the source of all wisom, Wikipedia). And California is quite a "green" state.
With sufficient electric car subsidies however, people won't be bothered by such irrelevant technicalities, though.
Possible over night capacity. If we are talking 100% takeup, the possibly no. But if we were talking 100% takeup by the customers, I'd assume lots of companies would spring up to provide a service for them. (Biodiesel generators in the gap it would take to build the cars, though 4 years seems more than enough to get some increase in grid capacity)
"...4 years seems more than enough to get some increase in grid capacity..."
Some maybe, in special cases or in countries where some mandarin comes and just makes land owner sign off the deal or else. Certainly not in Europe, with property transactions, EIA processes, pressure groups negotiations and so on and on taking years. I guess it's the same all over (democratic) world.
In the free world you have to take into account the fact that despite everyone agrees on some infrastructure being necessary, no one wants it in their backyard. And if they agree, they usually want something for it and on top some concessions that take time to negotiate. Sorry if it sounds patronising (that's not the intention), but I really want to show that things really do take time, often longer that people appreciate.
As a side note - I don't believe in biodiesel (unless from food production waste, which is only miniscule amount). It is more damaging to the environment than the normal one. It results in destroyed soil, erosion, requires massive amount of fertilisers. This is a brutal, dirty business violating nature. Actually, top soil would need many decades to naturally recover from such (ab)use.
Last estimate I saw was that the current US grid could support 70% of all transportation miles without needing a single extra power station.
As an example, I have a Chevrolet Volt. It charges at 3.3kW. I charge my Chevrolet Volt off peak, starting at midnight during the week and any time during the weekend. If my charging adds to the grid peak load it's only the standby Wattage of my EVSE. I'd charge off peak anyway, but it's cheaper for me to do so. Sensible pricing will naturally lead the market to charge away from peak demand.
The emissions from the required electricity are not a fundamental issue because it's substituting for petroleum-based fuels. Not only are there direct benefits from the substitution, but if plug-in vehicles are successful it will imply the existence of two things: cheap batteries and a massive, controllable demand sink. Both of those would provide substantial benefit to the electricity grid through raising generation efficiency and allowing easier integration of renewables.
What is the fuel-energy conversion efficiency of a modern all electric car compared to a modern petrol driven car? By that, I mean how much fuel do you need to burn in a power station compared to burning in an IC engine for the car to travel a certain distance.
I realise that the comparisons are complicated by the fact that power stations can burn 'low quality' fuel so they avoid the refining costs and there are, of course, the transport and infrastructure costs of car fuel distribution. Has anyone done a detailed analysis of this?
When I start my car on an average UK morning, the first thing I do is turn the heating full on for a good 15 minutes. In the winter, it's front and rear electric defrost for a good 10 minutes and 50% heating/demist all the time. In the summer, I have the aircon running. I have a feeling that these conditions would invalidate the mileage range claims for any electric vehicle.
"The average automobile engine is only about 35% efficient, and must also be kept idling at stoplights, wasting an additional 17% of the energy, resulting in an overall efficiency of 18%.[7] Large stationary electric generating plants have fewer of these competing requirements as well as more efficient Rankine cycles, so they are significantly more efficient than vehicle engines, around 50% "
Grid losses:
"Total losses: 1,423.5 MW (2.29% of peak demand)"
Charging efficiency:
80-90% (theoretically 92%, but who gets that)
So even ignoring:
- Nuke plants
- Renewables
- Regenerative braking
You get 97%*80%*50% ~40% efficiency from an unrefined, centrally delivered fuel as opposed to ~20% for a highly refined and locally distributed fuel.
Sorry - missed this para:
"When I start my car on an average UK morning, the first thing I do is turn the heating full on for a good 15 minutes. In the winter, it's front and rear electric defrost for a good 10 minutes and 50% heating/demist all the time. In the summer, I have the aircon running. I have a feeling that these conditions would invalidate the mileage range claims for any electric vehicle."
Err - it's plugged in, so all you need to do is tell it you'll be driving in 15 minutes, and use the mains feed to preheat the car. Easy. No cold running engine either...
"What is the fuel-energy conversion efficiency of a modern all electric car compared to a modern petrol driven car?"
Well I look at it like this - just comparing the basic energy per mile for both.
Tesla S 85kWh for ~250 miles = 1.2MJ/mile (85e3 W *3600 s /250)
My slightly lower weight but less aerodynamic diesel ( 55mpg measured over the last 1400 miles) = 3MJ/mile. ( 36MJ/L * 4.5 / 55 )
So it all comes down to electric generation/distribution/charging/discharging losses vs refining/transport losses. The electrical losses are the big variable country-country and indeed station-station with older coal-fired stations being particularly bad and gas, nuclear/wind/solar/hydro increasingly better.
"So it all comes down to electric generation/distribution/charging/discharging losses vs refining/transport losses."
Not forgetting all the various processes for creating everything needed too, eg pollution caused by mining the materials to build deep sea drill rigs, or mining and processing the rare earths to make the batteries and motors (sometimes highly dirty and toxic processes).
"My country's National Grid hasn't got the capacity to generate or deliver enough electricity"
Of course it does. Absolute worst case we just burn all the petrol we would have used but in big, heavy, efficient static power stations. I think we can do much much better than that. Especially because often battery charging can happen at any time of the night so we can wait for a point when there is little demand but a big gust happens to be passing the wind farm.
"we can wait for a point when there is little demand but a big gust happens to be passing the wind farm."
Ok, let's have a look at the National Grid generation history and see how often we have low demand and an excess of wind power then.
http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
So, we use 30GW worth of power overnight. We nominally have 8GW worth of installed wind capacity. This installed capacity has generated peaks of over 2GW but under 5.5GW for generously 20% of the year and has never, ever generated the nominally installed capacity. The remaining 80% of the year has been delivering under 2GW.
So, it looks roughly like the times that the times that your wind farms are going to be generating sufficant power to charge car batteries overnight from an excess of power generated from wind farms is going to be approximately "never".
Over the last week wind has produced less power than coal plants converted to burn trees (sorry, biomass) for the "green" renewable handouts this results in precisely twice. Burning biomass generates less than half what coal plants burning coal produce, which is turn is less than half what nuclear provides 24/7, which is less than half of what is produced by burning gas since gas and gas plants are cheap to build and everybody accepts them to "back up varying outputs from wind farms".
Usually backups are understood to be secondary fallbacks, rather than generating over fifteen times(!) the output of the supposedly primary wind plants.