It’s Hard to Provide Enough Electricity When All Cars Are Electric
It’s not just the amount of power that needs to be produced, but when and where power needs to be delivered
Not enough production capacity
Elon Musk, in his inimitable way, has created a buzz again about electric cars. This time it is sounding the alarm that there is not enough electricity production capacity in the United States to power everyone’s car if we all had an electric vehicle. He says there needs to be a lot more nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind energy generating sources.
How to get more electricity production capacity exposes the dark underbelly of an electric vehicle infrastructure. Just like turning the light on in our home, we plug our electric vehicles into a changing station without wondering where the electricity comes from. Electricity is just there when we need it.
Zero emissions?
As GM and others do, electric vehicles are hyped as “Zero Emissions.”
Well, not really. Two thirds of electricity in the US is produced in plants burning coal, natural gas, petroleum, and fossil fuels. About one fifth is from nuclear plants.
Point pollution in a fossil fuel plant is easier to control and mitigate than emissions from millions of vehicles spread all across the country. Still, emissions need to be dealt with and there are no perfect solutions. None of us wants one of these plants built in our backyard to add capacity to the nation’s electric grid.
Building a new nuclear plant creates a lot of waste that has to go somewhere. We have no long-term national policy in the US for where all the waste will go. Waste was supposed to go into Yucca Mountain. After spending billions of dollars preparing the site, that’s a debacle. Building new nuclear plants has also been a disaster. Nuclear plants with billions of dollars in construction costs have been shuttered in South Carolina and Georgia before they came online.
Solar has the obvious issue that it only produces power when the sun is shining. Wind turbines only produce power when the wind is blowing. We want to drive our cars at night, on cloudy days, and when the wind is not blowing. Geothermal is great if you live near the geysers in Yellowstone National Park. Producing clean power cost effectively is one thing. Storing the power and making it available when we want to use it is another.
I produced an innovation forum one time on clean energy. We had presentations independently prepared by professionals discussing nuclear, solar, biomass, and wind energy. The forum’s sponsor was a specialty chemical company seeking ways to develop products to support clean energy. When the forum was over, the sponsor’s leader said to his surprise that his greatest take away from across these independent presentations was that the biggest opportunity was not energy production, but energy storage and distribution. Energy is produced somewhere at some time, and it is consumed somewhere else at another time.
Electric vehicles dramatically increasing the demand for electricity creates another, not well-understood problem. Electric vehicles move around. The electric grid is designed for consumption that is fixed, primarily in buildings. The grid is not designed for regular huge surges like rush hour traffic. It is definitely not designed for unscheduled surges like people fleeing the coast in the path of a hurricane. Even for existing capacity, significant modifications are required to provide power to the same customer moving around to different places at different times.
Electricity generation, storage, and distribution are solvable problems. But they are problems that have to be solved. They should not be underestimated.
