A few years ago I was working with a custom builder on a house plan (that we didn't end up pursuing), but one of the things I suggested was future proofing the garage for electric cars. Given that a Tesla can charge on 80 amps, it seemed reasonable that a two car garage in a custom home should have 160 amp service. It may not useful right away, but it would very probably be useful over the life of a home.
He thought I was crazy, and maybe I was. But articles like this make me wonder.
Note that EVs are considered "continuous loads" under the US electrical code, so the circuit actually needs to be sized for 125% of the load (ie to charge at 80 A requires 100 A service, not 80 A service).
I believe Tesla has 48A and 72A chargers. An 80A circuit (wired and fused accordingly) can sustain this, since the wiring standards have some overhead in them for this.
It seems important to distinguish between wire rating (guage, junction, and length) vs fuse rating. Typically, you would fuse well below the wire rating (at least 25%) so unless you're worried about the breaker box flipping, ruining at 90% of the fuse rating is reasonable (if it is a stable 'non-inductive' load). Besides, Tesla (non-super) chargers are typically limited by the vehicle.
I'm not modifying wiring. I am not an elecrrician. I am a homeowner. I have read California/County/City codes, and low fuse rating has little to do with safety. You can put a 10A breaker on a 100A #3 guage circuit less than 50ft long and it won't magically become a hazard at 7.5A, however you shouldn't put larger than a 80A breaker on it for safety. If someone is installing a 100A (or even 80A) breaker on #5 AWG, then they have a problem, and are likely violating code because the breaker won't protect them. That is too high a fuse rating and is unsafe.
How would a normal homeowner even know if they were approaching 75% of their breaker rating, unless the breaker tripped at <75% of its stated limit? If someone has had 100A service installed with 100A breakers and it's not wired for at least 125A with #2, then they have been defrauded by their electrician and contracor.
If you think that inductive power factor doesn't matter for power efficiency, rating, and safety then I also recommend that you continue your education. I can't imagine a licensed electrician saying that.
> unless you're worried about the breaker box flipping, ruining at 90% of the fuse rating is reasonable (if it is a stable 'non-inductive' load).
A continuous load (usually) requires a breaker rated at 125% of the load, as calculated by the electrical load. A 90A continuous load on a normal 100A breaker is not okay, full stop. It doesn’t matter if that load is literally a giant resistor or is some real-world device.
> If someone has had 100A service installed with 100A breakers and it's not wired for at least 125A with #2, then they have been defrauded by their electrician and contracor.
In the infamous words of Wikipedia, citation needed. In standard US residential usage, a “200A service” is 200A for non-continuous loads and needs to be wired for 200 Amps. Same for 100A, etc. The only common exception I’ve heard of is “class 320” service, which is genuinely rated for 320A continuously, and that’ll have 400A wiring and perhaps a 400A main breaker or a pair of 200A breakers. The latter seems fairly common, since you can buy the hardware at Home Depot.
Great, I'm glad for this new information. So when I go out to look at my breaker box which is billed as 200A (or 400 which they will at least tell me is really 320) service and it has two 100A (or 200A) breakers for a house/garage full of loads, I just hope it doesn't burn down?
As a home owner how will I ever discover this in a non-catastrophic way? Will I put an ammeter clamp on at the breaker box with an alarm on it? Will I know the load of everything that is plugged into that service? The breaker won't blow, but the building will burn down... and it's not the fault of the electrician who installed it and code enforcement says it's fine?
As examples of non-continuous loads that are likely to be continuous for 8 hours or more: a double oven during Thanksgiving, halogen flood lamps at night, or an electric space heater during winter. Oops, you burned your house down for Christmas.
(edit) Discussing this with an electrician, he says that in fact the breaker will flip after extended/continuous load near the breaker limit. It would not be considered a hazard, because the home owner would experience the breaker flip each time before there was a problem. He also said that it's the difference between running at 75 vs 100% of rated current is about 15C of increased temp on the wires and also not a concern for copper.
Yeah, your breaker box that's billed as 200A and has a 200A main breaker and wiring rated at 200A is quite safe. The breaker is designed to trip after a certain amount of time depending on RMS current, and the wiring is supposed to be able to tolerate that with some safety margin.
Your 40A (or whatever) oven isn't a 40A continuous load even on Thanksgiving. It'll draw 40A (maybe) while heating up, but it'll use much less while maintaining temperature.
If you really want, you can probably melt your breaker box, though. You'll need some really nasty nonlinear loads. Off the top of my head, with standard single-phase service, you want lots of even harmonics so that you draw 200A from each phase but put more like 400A on the neutral. Since your breaker doesn't sense neutral current, you won't trip it. (I suspect you'll acutally fry your utility's transformer long before you melt your breaker box, though -- most utilities use a rather different formula for transformer sizing and can't actually supply your rated current for very long.)
Given the skin effect, the ampere rating of an AC cable should be the square root of the material used, more or less, but that's per cable.
Obviously you can't get around that by braiding cables, but does anyone ever try to save on material by running multiple independent cables? Or would that end up being more expensive overall?
My custom house is almost complete and we only put a single 40 amp circuit in the garage. I've lived with an EV for a few years now. 40 amps is plenty. When we get two EVs, 40 amps will still be plenty. The garage is also close enough to the breaker box that we can run another 40 amp circuit if we need to.
You don't need both of your Teslas to go from 0 range to 300+ miles in two hours everyday. If you did that much driving you'd be running a taxi service.
In our case, the charger will be between both bays. Assuming that both EVs have 300 mile range, we won't need to charge both cars everyday. (Edit) I'm also assuming someone will come out with a 40-amp dual-car charger that will split the load between two cars when both are plugged in.
Anyway, I did ask about 400 amp service because I wanted to use tankless electric water heaters. What he told me is that he'd have to wire in a second panel and second meter.
- An electric water heater is the only way to go truly "net zero"
- You can power it with solar panels
- Your gas company might have a high fixed charge (e.g. I pay $20/mo just for the hookup)
- Routing gas lines & exhaust can get expensive and quickly wipe out fuel savings
- Cutting gas service completely eliminates combustion concerns. No worries about combustion air, no carbon monoxide, etc.
- Electric might still be the service of the future; electric appliances are a bet on renewables
Now, a tankless electric can also get expensive if you wind up needing to upgrade your electric service. Which is why I ultimately went from tanked gas to tanked electric.
>An electric water heater is the only way to go truly "net zero"
Typically electricity are the worst in places where this is a meaningful benefit to consumers because the state usually has policies about sourcing its electricity that take environmental impact into account in such a way that price is driven through the roof.
Paying a premium for green energy is the best thing states can do to discourage conversion from fossil fuels to electric power.
$20/month just for a hookup sounds crazy. In California I pay around $20/month total for both gas and electric (and specifically renewables coming from the grid). I'm not sure if there are other utilities available in you area, but it sounds like you're getting ripped off.
There's just the one choice for me. The per-therm price is really low so it's fine in the winter, but now that the furnace is the only thing on gas, I wonder if I can suspend service over the summer.
Not that tankless electric is any better in this regard, but the selection of heat pumps has been dwindling precipitously because despite their small cost adder, their economics are still not very compelling. Which seems really unfortunate.
Actually, the whole water heating business seems to be like this. All kinds of way better tech than an old fashioned 82 AFUE open flue tanked, at really minor cost increases, but the cost of water heating in the first place just isn't that terribly high.
In the end the most significant cost savings on my water heater replacement project, turned out to be the space heating savings from closing the old atmospheric vent & combustion air vent.
I’m in the process of doing both at once. I’m getting rid of a non-sealed crappy inefficient heater and replacing it with a 95%+-efficient sealed combustion, combined heat-and-hot-water boiler.
Do you have online resources to recommend for a beginner looking to learn more about these topics, in order to make educated choices on future house projects?
Ah, makes sense. Tankless gas is a cheaper ongoing way to go in the US then, though installation costs may be higher since you might need a larger diameter gas line put in.
When I had upgraded service run to my 1923 house, I ran 200 amps to the detached garage and 200 amps to the house. The extra cost vs a smaller service is marginal.
I would suggest 200A service as a bare minimum, with 400A being ideal (this will be heavily dependent on your electric utility service entrance). Consider two EVs, HVAC loads, and possibly electric water heaters, clothes dryers, and a stove. Also, NEC 80% derating (100A circuit required for an 80A 100% duty cycle load).
The electrician's time is the most expensive part; oversize for decisions such as these (load center, EV run to outlet, subpanels, etc).
After putting up panels at my relatively modest house, I’m honestly surprised at the kind of juice I can produce. I’m ready to convert everything I have to electricity
If you didn't put a battery in at install time, there's a recent IRS determination suggesting [1] you can still receive the 30% tax credit if the battery is installed at a later date. I would highly recommend pulling the trigger right before the tax credit begins its phase out at the end of 2019, assuming costs come down further between now and then.
The caveat is that your system must charge the battery from your panels, and cannot charge from the utility (trivial inverter setting). With that said, based on net metering laws in most locales, it behooves you to consume as much of your own production as possible. Exceptions abound.
We have net metering here, so the grid is basically my battery. It would be more worthwhile if I could charge from the grid but I’m way overproducing as is.
200+ A circuits in a residential home really makes a point for 400 V three phase (where the same load would be ok with a standard 63 A circuit, which is still a lot). [1]
However, when more and more people try to have fast chargers in their homes for EVs, then not only the residential installation poses a problem, but utilities would need to rebuild ~two layers of distribution to accomodate for a 100-200 % increase in residential power consumption.
[1] Not just because high currents are more difficult to handle properly, but also because you need a lot less copper.
If you live in a subdivision built within the past couple decades, your electric runs underground, making it quite expensive to run a second or third primary phase. You also then need a three-phase transformer, which is considerably larger than a typical one-phase. Oh, and your service will be commercial/industrial, which typically comes with demand and energy charges that can be quite steep: https://www.northwesternenergy.com/docs/default-source/docum...
That's true, for North America, but entirely misses the point I made (i.e. when you try to push dozens of kW into a house, single phase becomes worse than a below-average idea).
Which is one of the logical conclusions of products like the PowerWall. I think the current model can only run like 25 amps but an in house fast charger that can pull 10 or 20 amps during off peak hours and dump 60 amps when charging the car could be a cheaper installation.
Hell if the PowerWall 3 could dump 40 amps you could pull 20 from the wall at the same time and hit your 60 amp total.
If your utility lets you do this... in many areas, increasing your service amperage is expensive if you don't use a majority of that additional capacity.
Future proofing isn't all about providing a service today for a possible need tomorrow. Plenty of fiber is sitting in walls unused because people thought in-home fiber networks were going to be a thing. Don't provide the cables. Provide the conduit for future cables. Leave the accessible passages and pull-throughs and let future generations decide exactly which cables to install.
I have similar experience - you dont know what will be useful in the future. Someone put in Cat5 cables 20 years ago into my place - nice idea. There is cat5 to the kitchen which is a waste of time now that wifi is here. Meanwhile it isn't fast enough for gig ether to my server so I put a new cable in. Likewise I have analog component video wires in the wall which is useless when I want HDMI.
As mentioned above, my builder friends will put in PVC pipe to run cables between floors and in walls. This allows cables to be replaced relatively easily if their time of usefulness is exceeded.
This seems to be a common best practice, sort of like blowing in expandable foam insulation between the historic (unchangeable) facade and new inner walls to properly insulate a historic home.
Electrical Metallic Tubing (EMT) conduits are similar but more stringent (fire protection).
Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking in regard to the above commentary. By the time you get an electric car, a table saw, a band saw, a dust collector... and that's before the mention of an electric tankless water heater. Throw in there some grow lights for your greenhouse or whatever other high-electric hobbies you might have and the numbers above start to look really reasonable.
I haven't added power to my detached garage yet, but when I do, it's getting 200 amp service. I don't have an electric car (yet) and I may not before I move out of the house, but somebody is eventually going to live in that house and have an electric car.
160 amps alone is more than standard house connect. In any case you will likely be charging overnight, and then given the time available pumping 80 amps into your precious depreciating battery is a great way to make it lose lots of value, quick.
What people need in their garage is 20 amps for the trickle charge to replenish the 30 miles lost from their commute and some grocery shopping overnight.
It's likely a 100% EV home would want the option to charge as quickly as possible, even if they trickle charge most of the time for the sake of battery life.
It's also likely that future EVs won't have this battery limitation, just put in the heavier gauge wires and breakers while you're in there if the house is going to be around for the next century.
This scenario seems contrived to me. You'd have to have an emergency immediately upon the termination of a trip during which you'd completely exhausted your battery.
You can run out of gas in an ICE car too, and then it's even worse because you need to go track down a gas can instead of plugging in. The simple solution, of course, is to never fly that close to the Sun.
With a gasoline car, you can in most cases drive to the next gas station, and get enough fuel to get to the hospital within 1-2m. With an EV, you have to wait. Did I overlook something?
The scenario of an empty EV battery is not that unlikely. Eg you forgot to charge when you returned.
Not really. Where I am that'd take at least double the time. Depends on what kind of emergency it is, of course, I'd not move someone with spinal injury, but if my girlfriend is feeling terribly sick, I'd rather drive her (that's an actual real life example that happened to me).
Depending on your insurance, ambulance and emergency charges can be either rather high copay or only % covered, and are NEVER cheap on their face.
My wife drove me to the emergency room on a 3am Sunday morning when I felt like someone was pushing a golf ball out through my ribs and I had my gall bladder out that week. $750 copay for ambulance service.
I am aware that the ambulance is not free in the US, but it's quite hard to comprehend I guess. Especially in an emergency, I wouldn't think of anything other than calling one, driving to hospital myself wouldn't even cross my mind.
Yes, but you're talking about a maybe once in a lifetime event here (need to rush to the hospital, but you just got home with your EV on 1% battery). Just eat the ambulance bill and curse your bad luck.
This is maybe off topic, but it also may pave the way for us to use nuclear energy to produce electricity without greenhouse emissions. I think the problem we have yet to solve with nuclear, is safety diligence. Maybe some automation can help with modern tech? Or maybe with efficient manufacturing like 3d printing, we could tear them down and rebuild them each year?
In the case of the Three Miles Island Accident, modern sensors and more automation would have helped. With Fukushima, automation wouldn't have helped, what they were lacking was better tsunami protection, more resistant construction, bigger battery backups. At Tschernobyl they had an inherently unsafe reactor type, operated the reactor outside the safety parameters and had safety systems deactivated. Not much you can do about that.
Automation would help, but more modern reactor designs that are less prone to causing problems likely have a much bigger impact.
>Or maybe with efficient manufacturing like 3d printing, we could tear them down and rebuild them each year?
Tearing nuclear reactors down on regular basis sounds like a much worse nuclear waste problem than the power production already is. All the stuff that would be interesting to tear down and rebuild is contaminated from radiation exposure.
IMHO utilities need to realize that their business model of the future is to provide load balancing services and backup power to customers as much as it is to sell electricity. If they wait too long to start acting and keep fighting decentralized generation, they risk losing their value proposition as more people install batteries at home.
If that happens I could see them setting themselves up for a big political fight against their customers as they try to maintain their business by force/law.
The problem is what you suggest would destroy them as businesses. You have just described them doing "just" the parts of their business where they operate at a loss with massive multi-decade debt loads.
Generation is the only part of the business that produces the money to fund the infrastructure and the generation is the cheapest part of the business.
We used to have this concept that utilities were regulated monopolies. On the one hand, they were told exactly how much they were allowed to charge, and what services they had to provide (and where, and to whom). On the other hand, they were assured that they had no competition and that they would always be slightly profitable. It was good for the stock market, too -- a utility would have exceptionally low volatility and pay regular dividends, being nearly as safe as anything can be.
Generation is the only part of the business that produces the money to fund the infrastructure and the generation is the cheapest part of the business.
To a large extent, that business model is obsolete in many places. For example Consolidated Edison in NYC used to generate most of its own power. Here is a link to a generating station they used to own but were forced to divest:
Due to deregulation of the energy markets in New York State, Con Edison was required to sell all of its "in-city" generating stations in New York City including Ravenswood. In 1999, Con Edison transferred ownership of Ravenswood to KeySpan Energy (KeySpan) for $597 million.
I think it's stupid, but nobody asked me before they forced this on Con Ed.
Yeah it is obsolete in many places but the difference between retail and wholesale prices is how they pay for their infrastructure so the driver is still the same model from the perspective of the utility.
They were legally forced to sell as well, not due to a lack of profitability.
They have to lobby to start charging for the services they will do in the future. If they don't do that, they will soon have to lobby to get free money from people, and that last one can only end badly.
At which point you are paying a subscription fee to maintain the infrastructure which will quickly eat up much of the value of decentralization. But yeah, they probably will have to move to that model and disconnect generation from delivery in the same entity.
Rising living standards are bad? Growth doesn’t have to consume more material resources. (Computation and thus energy, on the other hand, it probably does.)
There's a finite need for ovens, or lamps, or whatever. In some countries, I'm sure that need isn't met, maybe everywhere, who knows.
But at some point you can't sell more product than what breaks down and needs replacing, which I would call maintenance mode, not growth.
At that point, you either start designing obsolescence into the products (arguably already done in both lamps and other various electric appliances), or you need to disrupt the industry to supply something worth replacing to, or you (or at least a majority of the workers) move to another industry where growth can happen.
I absolutely don't want to live in a society where electricity needs grow in perpetuity, or every house gets more and more lamps "just cuz".
The end goal for any company should be monopoly in their market, at which point they slash their workforce to just keep the market, and divest into another market (where they can then employ the workers again).
Growth isn't just about consumerism it's about human flourishing. We grow not just because we produce things we grow because we get better and better at using the resources around us which provide more flourishing for more and more humans. Without growth we can't do that as we won't have the surplus to invent and invest in new technologies.
Improve medicine, explore space, optimize production methods, invent new energy method etc. for more and more people. Those require growth.
I recently finished reading Affluence Without Abundance, about bushmen in Southern Africa https://www.amazon.com/Affluence-Without-Abundance-Disappear.... Their culture survived stably without growth for over 100,000 years. They enjoyed more leisure time with less work than us.
By contrast, in under 250 years since Adam Smith our culture's growth is trashing the planet in nearly every place we measure. The Growth Delusion develops and documents problems with growth further https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Delusion-Poverty-Well-Being-Na....
Many times we make an advance like, say, anesthetics, growth leads to things like opioid epidemics.
You can live how you want, but you may want to reconsider what sounds like an unqualified faith in a pattern that may have worked when we had a lot of empty planet to expand into, but creates problems when we learn that we don't any more.
But they didn't live very long, they died from natural catastrophes, they lived extremely simple lives and most likely in complete ignorance of the world around them, weren't that many of them, if an asteroid had come to hit them they would be wiped out with any chance of doing anything about it and most of importantly, don't live in a world like that any because the same humans that the book seems to glorify evolved into us. So that's kind of a moot point. Also keep in mind it's the same kind of bushmen that would use fire to burn huge parts of vegation.
The fact is that we have gotten increasingly better and better at converting the earth's resources into serving our needs and have been able to effectively optimize and improve our ability to get more out of less. Most importantly wherever you see humans flourish and get wealthy enough the environment improve because we start to care about it and get the power to do something about it.
Humans didn't use to live in harmony with nature, they used to live in fear of nature. Mother nature is brutal to humans and it's only because we have gotten better and better at controlling it that humans could flourish.
I am unconvinced that minimizing our impact on nature is the moral thing to do and unconvinced that what we are doing right now is by any metrics worse than what those bushmen did. Too many people romanticize humans relationship with nature.
Your description of them sounds nothing like my understanding of their culture and lives I got from the book. My point isn't to glorify anything (nor was the book's) anyway.
There is plenty of evidence countering a faith in growth. A culture that has existed for several orders of magnitude longer than ours is strong evidence. It would even if they were as ignorant and fearful as you describe them. That there were the opposite strengthens the case.
I'm not sure if you were suggesting that people in our culture are not ignorant or fearful, but I see a lot of it, or if you're suggesting that past flourishing means it will continue, but I wouldn't bet on it unless we change a lot.
What in my description of their lives is incorrect according to the book?
The culture you are referring to did so for 100.000 years because it couldn't consume enough of its surroundings for it to have to worry about anything.
We don't live in such a world and unless you can give me an alternative to growth that allows all the people who haven't gotten up to our standards of living then I am not sure what you are trying to get at.
Of course, our culture is also ignorant compared to the future that's not the point. The difference is that our culture is learning and evolving, their culture wasn't until they got out of their environment and started exploring the rest of the world.
I am not talking about past flourishing I am saying that the only way (I would welcome arguments for the opposites, the bushmen isn't one) for humans to keep flourishing is growing.
Not upsetting. It interesting, really. Finding ways to economically rationalize good climate behavior. You no longer need to ask people to install renewables to save the planet; it just makes plain economic sense [1] [2].
Utilities need electrical usage growth to offset consumption stagnation (and occasionally, structural and energy efficiency declines). That growth will occur moving ground transportation off of oil. If that creates an unexpected coalition, why not roll with it? It'll increase the EV uptake rate, it'll ensure transmission infrastructure still sees necessary upgrades and investment, and because vehicle charging can be structured around time of day metering, they're a perfect mix for more renewables being added to the grid.
EDIT: OP I replied to should not be downvoted. The situation really is dire [3]. At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation; we can and must do better, but we're going to have to properly incentivize action and rapidly increase the replacement rate of fossil fuel generation.
>At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation
This seemed off to me, so I checked the source. From TFA (in Technology Review):
>Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.
>At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.
Can anyone tell me how can this possibly compute? 94% of new electricity generation is renewable,[1] and it's not like power plants have a lifetime of 400 years...
edit: Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time. They're using numbers from 2003! Essentially they're looking at the tail beginning of the logistic adoption curve[2] (the sloooooooow exponential ramp) and extrapolating it in a linear fashion. But logistic curves are "S-shaped," not linear.
Wind and solar need tons and tons of land to power our energy needs, and the developing world will need more and more power to escape poverty. Solar panels on every house might be sufficient, but it's far more expensive and consumes far more area than nuclear. We need cheap and abundant nuclear power to bring our carbon emissions down without wasting tons of acreage (something like an area the size of the US to power the world, per Steven Pinker) on power generation.
This comes up in every thread, but it's not realistic. It takes a decade and a billion dollars (at least) to build new nuclear power plants. It's not happening, at least not in the time frame we need to keep global warming below 4C (2C is a pipe dream at this point). [1]
It would only take 0.6 percent of total US land mass covered in solar to power the entire country (about 100 miles by 100 miles). The batteries to back that energy production would only be about 1 square mile. That doesn't take into account residential rooftop solar already producing. Nor wind turbine parks in the middle of nowhere that contribute to farmer and rancher incomes. Offshore wind can be sited anywhere along the costs outside of shipping lanes, far enough off in the distance to not be seen but close enough to keep transmission costs reasonable. We are awash in clean, renewable energy.
To your point about the developing world, India is aggressively deploying solar, and is 4 years ahead of its solar capacity targets.
Solar and wind are ramping on curves somewhere between linear and exponential. They can be turned up in months, not years. They can be sited almost anywhere. They are what is going to win the day.
"In comparison with nuclear, the amount of solar power built in 2016, taking into account how many hours each can operate each day, is the equivalent of more than 3 new nuclear plants.
To dive in a little deeper: let’s use a 25 percent capacity factor for new solar, making the 14,626 MW installed equivalent to 3,650 MW of theoretically perfectly running nuclear plants. The Westinghouse AP 1000 units under construction for the last 7-10+ years produce about 1,100 MW. So, in one year, solar additions were equal to what takes more than 7 years to build. The difference in speed of deployment is why UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) is clear that nuclear power isn’t a near-term climate solution."
So if you're not going to take my (rando HN poster's) word for it, the Union of Concerned Scientists seems somewhat reputable.
The SG9 in the latest Virginia class submarines are only 30MW. As of 2001 The Navy has constructed over 235 nuclear reactors, with many more since. An average of >5 per year. For Nuclear reactors that is mass production.
Also because of the way the Navy works their reactors are less bespoke for each ship than traditional land based reactors - and better fit the mass production model. This is something that could scale.
And how are you going to grow a hyothetical "tiny nuclear reactor" buisiness faster than solar and wind are growing right now? By the time development is done, operating permits are sorted out and production is ramped up the idea will hardly be profitable, and certainly not nessesary anymore.
Both Wind and Solar can in many cases be co-located with other land usage.
Wind farms go great on agricultural farms - they tend to have wide open spaces, and the actual footprint of a tower can have minor impact upon the productivity of the field.
Solar generation goes great on both residential and in particular - commercial buildings, over the tops of parking lots, etc - which has the dual effect of producing power and reducing the heating of the underlying building/parked cars (great for reducing the need for air conditioning)
Your average suburban home has enough roof area to produce either all of, or a significant fraction of, it's own energy for a moderate household.
Marginal-use land (hilly areas), coastal areas, and off-shore are also generally good areas for windfarms too.
Wind and solar need tons and tons of land to power our energy needs
Elon Musk begs to differ. Here's something he said:
“If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,” Musk said at at the event in Rhode Island. “The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.”https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...
something like an area the size of the US to power the world, per Steven Pinker
Not to slag on Pinker, but Musk has proved himself to be a hell of a lot better visionary in the real world than most anyone else, and that includes pop authors.
Somewhere else I saw a claim of 0.6% of US land area needed for US power needs. Even if it's 1%, no BFD. Let's assume that many areas of the world don't have as good solar irradiance as the USA. So maybe it's 2% in some other places. Still, no BFD.
IMO the biggest problem with current nuclear is that it's run by utility companies. Those places aren't staffed by the world's brightest bulbs (heh heh). Allowing morons like that to build and manage nuclear plants is akin to allowing toddlers to play with live hand grenades. Most of the time they don't pull the pin, but when they do the results aren't pretty.
PV solar is simplicity itself. No moving parts. Linear economies of scale: 2x the panels means 2x the cost and 2x the power.
There is no exponential when it comes to renewables. The only source of energy we have that provides exponential is nuclear but unfortunately, there is a lot of pushback although it's both greener and provides more energy than wind and solar can ever do.
Furthermore, while they are renewable to they are also unreliable and need to have backup sources which makes them unfit as a enegy base. Remove the subsidies and you will see just how problematic they are.
And then we haven't even looked at the problem with producing them, maintaining them etc.
The thing that drives climate change is the burning of fossil fuels needed produce electricity in the first place. Keeping the rate of electric production constant will not help us. The fact that electric energy usage is dropping is a good thing and we should keep a negative derivative, not increase it! There needs to be a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, keeping it constant (or even worse, increasing it) will not help this.
I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children.
The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.
I think your points are important separately, but the crucial missing part is that electric energy production is rapidly becoming decoupled from greenhouse gas production. It is no longer an either/or situation.
Worldwide, most of the energy that comes from wind and solar is a tiny fraction of the primary energy supply mix. Where it's growing it's mostly used for additional energy, not to replace the exisiting fossil-fuel consumption. This does not help one bit for climate change.
The important thing in this grap is the absolute values of each source, not their relative importance.
You'll note that despite renewable growth (of which solar and wind is only a fraction, there's also biomass and various other stuff), fossil-fuel consumption is still growing faster.
Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones. Each time, the new sources just provide additional power on top of the old ones.
For sure, fossil fuels will still be around for a while. But renewable sources are absolutely going to replace existing fossil-fuel consumption. The economics of it make it an inevitability. Aside from a few niche applications (industrial heating perhaps), there's nothing better about fossil fuels. They've just been the best we had for a long time. Some of this will be sooner (because you decide to buy an EV next month), and some later (because a coal plant gets decommissioned 10 years from now), but the writing is on the wall.
If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.
The volume of whale oil used back in the 19th century is laughably anecdotic compared to petroleum.
When we talk about our energy needs, scale matters a lot. So yes, when it comes to climate change and energy use, you can ignore the rest of human history completely.
No, I mean that the scale of whale oil use was very very small compared to the scale of fossil fuels. So small, in fact, that if whale oil was on the graph I've linked above, you would barely see it moving above 0 in the 19th century.
Also, whale oil was not really used as an energy source anyway, except in lamps.
So it's completely irrelevant to my original point, which is that by and large, until now, in the thermo-industrial civilization, new energy sources have not been used to replace exisiting ones. They have been used to 'grow' the economy (more machines, more people, more production).
This is why we need a government imposed carbon tax to price in the externality of carbon emissions. Then we can let the free market loose to do its thing without the perverse incentives that encourage carbon-emitting energy sources today.
It is possible to decrease the actual consumption of heating, though. Insulation in many houses across the frigid Midwest and northern plains is pretty bad. Trailers in trailer parks often have almost none and draughts besides. Unfortunately the free market already hands people a big monthly incentive to insulate their properties; the problem is education and technology adoption, which can take a while for markets to correct without a centralized "nudge", and the people who need it the most are precisely those most resistant to government intervention.
Most of the people who own poorly insulated buildings do not just have thousands of dollars laying around to insulate them, regardless of how good the ROI is. It is far more a lack of money than lack of education, many poor people are fully aware of the money-saving opportunities afforded to people with access to more capital. And of course many people live in rental properties where the landlord would pay for the insulation to save the tenant's money on HVAC bills- the economic incentives are not aligned at all.
You can provide low cost or free insulation (including fitting) to poor people.
This is one way to make welfare payments more effective. People are spending their money on food, and not as much on heating.
If you live in a country with denationalised utility companies you can get them to pay for this from the profits they're getting after denationalisation.
But, even when you do this you find people have different reasons for not accepting the offer.
The UK "Nudge Unit" found that the thing that drove more signups to loft insulation wasn't just free insulation, but offering a free loft clearance service too.
> For years, by offering financial help to insulate people's lofts, thereby reducing their energy consumption and their bills, successive governments had been trying to give money away – and failing. But in 2011, the nudge unit realised that money wasn't the problem. What held people back was all the clutter that they knew was stored up there.
> So in a trial, people were offered not subsidised insulation, but subsidised loft clearance – with unwanted items being taken to local charity shops – on the condition that they got the space insulated afterwards. The scheme cost people more, but they loved it, and uptake rates tripled. If the insulation was subsidised as well, it became a fivefold increase. Another approach was less successful, but equally revealing. When offered a still greater discount for every friend or neighbour they roped in, people took no interest. You cannot put a price, it appears, on being seen to be a loft-botherer.
This is exactly what I was thinking of, thank you for dredging up the source. Interesting that cleaning the attic is the real barrier at the end of the day.
You're right, the article makes a simplistic and greedy-sounding point. A better way to put it would be: electric vehicles are a good way to shift the roughly 30% of our energy consumption that is transportation from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We can do this by taking advantage of the electric grid infrastructure that's already there, which saves us some money (vs. for example building out a giant hydrogen supply network).
The profit motive keeps the grid healthy. If utilities suddenly become strapped for cash, the grid suffers. And transitioning from internal combustion to pulling power from the grid will decrease resources needed for creating energy and upend the gasoline distribution economy.
When have we not been on the verge of a “mass species extinction” event on our blue dot? Also, I believe it was a mass extinction that allowed us homo erectus to thrive.
I don't know how you think we can't. A few degrees C over a hundred years? If humanity can't adapt to that we're the least adaptable species ever.
Humanity is thriving during a period which started about 20k years ago where the global temperature is 10°C higher than for most of the past 2 million years.
> We're on the verge of a mass species extinction event
No, we're really not. Climate change due to carbon emission is real, but we'll reduce our carbon emission "in time" to avoid extinction level increases and/or adapt to the environment more drastically if we miss that target.
I assumed that's what you meant and the grandparent poster may have meant the same too. But, it's worth remembering that humanity as a species may not be especially immune to the same conditions that are decimating other animal populations and reducing biodiversity in the last 100 years.
"The Problem: The US electricity transmission and distribution system – or ‘grid’ -- is in critical need of an upgrade. It is old, balkanized and too limited in its reach. The current grid is a series of independently operating regional grids – it can’t meet the needs of a nation whose economy would benefit substantially from the system optimization that comes with national interconnection. Its limitations and vulnerability to failure are also reported to cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year in losses due to grid-related power outages and power quality issues.1 And most critical to clean energy development, areas rich in renewable resources like solar, wind and geothermal are currently not well-served and thus have no ‘highway’ available to move power outputs to the markets where that power is needed"
US utilities don't need saving. It seems like a bizzare statement to make. The reason behind the slow growth in electricity demand is the high price dictated by environmental politics.
Also having such a high burst in demand will be a major problem, not a benefit. Maybe we need to account for grid expansion, peak demand management and production capacity increase costs in a new bill of EV taxes. Arguing that it's good for the economy because of jobs is the same like arguing war is good for the economy because you get to rebuild infrastructure. It's not, we can use this potential for more useful things.
>The reason behind the slow growth in electricity demand is the high price dictated by environmental politics.
That seems like a pretty dubious claim. For one thing, how often do you (or any home or business owner) not turn stuff on because of how much it might cost them? For another, the largest driver in my understanding is growing energy efficiency (e.g. LED's use fractions of the old incandescent bulbs)
Energy efficiency has been a big factor, but an even bigger one is the energy-intensive heavy industry fleeing from the developed world to china and other places where power is cheap and plenty. Countries like Germany that kept their industry at home face extraorbitant prices. I think they pay close to 30+cents/kWh.
Residential power is more expensive (per kWh) than industrial power, which might also be subsidised depending on industry — likely the same for most western countries. Half of the residential price is a good approximation for Germany.
Why not? Utilities make money by power transmission. Even if every single house in the US has solar panels there still is a massive market around transferring power between houses to balance loads and time of use issues. In my direct and relevant experience talking with r&d folks and strategic planners at big utilities, they treat cheaper utilities as another market to get in to. They don't think of it as a threat to their business.
I'm not following. Let's say current transmission and generation is the baseline. In the future when there is distributed generation, transmission is definitely going to go down as generation will be tightly coupled with supplying private, commercial, or industrial entities (eg panels on the roof). So generation goes down (since more renewable), and distribution as well on average (due to coupling mechanisms).
A lot of the charging will happen at homes at night, so until energy storage doesn’t add 200% to the cost to take a solar install to solar + storage, the utilities are still going to be the power providers.
There are also going to be (hopefully) some low cost utility scale storage options that, along with the 50% cost advantage of utility solar over rooftop, could be combined with the existing distribution infrastructure to provide low-cost and low-carbon energy for transportation.
Most electric cars won't need to be charged from empty to full everyday.. If someone drives just few miles a day, they will be able to either do trickle charging with solar panels, or do full charge on weekends where the car is mostly sitting idle. And if you're traveling on weekends, you will use superchargers, which might be powered by solar.
Not likely any time soon. There's absolutely no way humans are going to pull >1000 lbs worth of batteries out of the car every day, and put the same >1000 lbs worth of batteries into it. With a unit of work of 50 lbs (reasonable for fit people), and a minute to pull out each pack, stow it away, take fresh pack and put it back in, it would take half an hour of hard physical work every day. No way regular people are going to do that.
I definitely carry jerry cans when I want to fill up my vehicles at home, which is the context we are in — we were talking about home rooftop solar installation, and how it can or cannot be used to charge cars overnight.
Ok, fair point. Sometimes though you have to take a step back and appreciate the wonderful complexity of the universe. So long have we railed against utilities for their environmental destruction - when it looks like they might be the actual solution for what we face.
It really makes you question all of your assumptions about what you know and the people who you think might be working against you. Maybe there is some way they can work with you.
He thought I was crazy, and maybe I was. But articles like this make me wonder.