For example, our electric grid can’t handle everyone using electric cars. Everything from electricity production to distribution needs to be upgraded. There is a massive cost to that.
I've heard the "grid can't handle all EVs" statement, but have not seen anything backing up the claim.
I believe the grid can in fact handle EVs becoming prevalent. We might need more power generation, which could be new plants, and/or residential solar.
Baring some kind of crazy legislation requiring ICE vehicles to be crushed or permanently parked, we are decades away from a scenario where pure EVs are the dominant vehicle type on the road. There are just too many serviceable ICE vehicles in play to expect them to really go away in the next quarter century or so. That allows plenty of time for anything the current power generation and distribution infrastructure lacks to be adequately addressed.
The US's annual gasoline consumption is 135 bn gallons (2021 figure). At around 20 mpg (random estimate because I have to pick something), that works out to 2.7 trillion miles. At 30 kWh/100mi (figure from google), that works out 800 TWh if every gas vehicle in the US was suddenly switched for an electric one, or about 20% of the US's annual electricty generation of 4222.5 TWh (2018 figure). Also, that's about 5x the global crypto energy usage, vs just America's cars. [Obvious disclaimers: some of those estimates are arbitrary and not perfect, but they're in the right ballpark, and we obviously wouldn't switch to electric cars overnight]
Crypto was bad because it didn't actually accomplish anything with that power usage, but it was a pretty small footnote on the grand scheme of things.
Indeed seems manageable.
That is an astonishing amount of electricity for something of so little value.
But anyway, to the larger point, I agree the grid impact is overblown, especially since we should be coupling consumer BEVs with home / business / warehouse / commercial solar.
There's always going to be people who will need to drive, but there's a hell of a lot of people who could be perfectly adequately served by strong public transportation.
1) where power is generated and used for crypto isn’t the same as needed for electric cars. Locations matter when you’re dealing with the creation of and distribution of electricity
2) moving electricity to all of the locations where it will be used is another problem. That deals with transmission lines, transformers, the last mile, and all of that stuff. That we don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it’s not a problem. It is Andy the lack of awareness and planning concerns me.
An ev drains way more power then a 2kw space heater.
A 2kW space heater used just 12 hours a day uses the same power per day as 4 mile per kWh EV driven 35,000 miles per year. Many space heaters see more than 12h/day of use but 35k miles per year is extremely rare.
EV’s are like microwaves, they use a lot of power when on but the grid cares about average load across millions of them not what’s happening in any one home.
Your hypothetical 2kw space heater uses 24kWh a day and is drastically less efficient than a heat pump.
The next time I need to plug it in is maybe on Saturday.
You need to use your electric heater 24/7 to not freeze.
Substation and individual point of charge capacity may not be there for areas without ac, or high density apartments - but that's where distributed charging stations come into play (aka charging stations) (very low volume of gasoline is distributed to home parking, currently). In the worst cases this is readily reduced with storage (liquid or power wall) at distribution centers.
I bet you the electrical grid couldn't handle everyone having an air conditioner in Texas in the 1920s but slowly people installed window and later central ACs and the grid grew.
The situation where everyone suddenly had an electric car is implausible
Cite for that? That's simply not true. In fact of all major infrastructure media in modern society, electrical transmission is by far the cheapest to upgrade. Even discounting industrial electricity and adding on DC charging of the EV, my household usage has gone up 35%.
You really don't think society can absorb a 35% growth in one infrastructure sector? That's just silly. Obviously there are "costs", but there's no justification for "can't handle" or "massive". At all.
Electric car batteries are even seen as part of the solution to move to renewables.
Industries are built when demand is rising, infrastructure always has to change to cover the needs of the population.
EVs will be important sinks for electrical energy in the future, to balance out demand.
Assuming 100% of new cars where EV’s you’re talking 25 years before adoption approaches 98%. Plus on average each EV is only using ~50,000kWh / year or 400 watts average load.
In all likelihood, gasoline transportation costs an order of magnitude more than electricity. And that's not just infrastructure that is already paid for. There is a much larger maintenance cost, an ongoing labor cost, and a much shorter useful life for anything related to fossil fuels.
This statement just doesn't pass even the most lax economic sanity check.
Why don't all the use cases where people don't care about anything other than the bottom dollar and don't run up against the weaknesses of modern batteries already run electric vehicles. I'm thinking like low daily mileage fleet of small vehicles in a warm climate somewhere with high fuel costs. Like why doesn't an EV Fiat Promaster exist and why doesn't every tradesman in Sicily run one? If the numbers penciled out then surely we'd have it, at least in some niche somewhere. We are starting to see mass EV adoption but it's right on the margin and the details on any specific use case make it cheaper or maybe not.
Longer term though, EVs replacing gasoline vehicles for those kind of use-cases is exactly what we're going to see. In the US, the postal service intends to start deploying tens of thousands of EVs over the next few years as they replace older gasoline powered delivery vehicles. The economics do apparently work out and pass the sanity check, just not overnight.
But anyway, your answer is because transportation costs are irrelevant for both gasoline and electricity. So, even tough they are much cheaper for electricity, none makes any difference, and nobody picks a power source based on them.
But some people makes a huge effort to focus on this non-issue and turn it into a showstopper on their discourse. People resorting to this is good evidence that there aren't any large showstoppers for cars electrification.
