FoxtrotDeltaTangoWell, That’s One Way to Sell Americans on Electric Cars. The U.S. has been wary of EVs. As the cost of gas soars, we’re now paying the price.
I mean… The main reason is people don’t have money for a new car. Also the electrical infrastructure in this country is not ready for everyone to go electric.
The gas and oil industries have paid TONS of money to keep people locked into gas vehicles.
Once again, the rich continue to fuck the rest of us.
Also the electrical infrastructure in this country is not ready for everyone to go electric.
You’re repeating big oil talking points. We improve the grid all the time, we can continue to do it. Sure if all cars were magically converted into EVs tomorrow we would have big problems, but that’s not how the real world works.
If the grid actually was about to fall over because of a few more EVs, these datacenters spinning up all over the place would be even bigger disasters than they already are.
I’m not using big oil talking points. I’m saying in reality, because of the damage that big oil has done to keep us from going electric, the infrastructure is not currently there.
They’ve paid money to keep us from expanding our grid. They are saying it won’t work because they are making sure it doesn’t.
I completely agree with you that I think it is absolutely possible, but there are bigger things blocking the way.
theneverfoxThis is a pretend problem. When have EVs ever caused rolling brown outs?
Grid can’t handle the current of all the cars charging at once? Charge them slower. Get a battery bank for your home to smooth out the demand curve. Throw banks of supercaps at fast charging stations. Fix the fucking grid as you go. Use battery banks on the grid to even out demand at any level. Hell, you can use the cars themselves as battery banks and bring back rooftop solar tax breaks
It’s a fake problem, our grid and production do genuinely need work, but in practice EV adoption hasn’t been a limiting factor at all
Get a battery bank for your home to smooth out the demand curve.
I’d advise anyone considering buying a battery bank to look at this one simple metric:
Take the price of the battery bank, divide it by the total number of kWh that the battery bank will source to your electric devices over the battery bank’s lifetime. That should give you a figure of $ per kWh that you can compare with what you currently pay for electricity.
Anytime I have run that exercise, the battery bank is costing me near or more per kWh than I pay for electricity from the grid, even if I am charging the battery for free (which is never the case, even with solar there’s a cost of installation and maintenance.)
If you want the battery bank for grid independence, it’ll do that, but know there’s a cost.
If you live in some crazy demand variable tariff area where you pay $0.20 more per kWh during peak than you do in off hours, the battery may make financial sense for you there, particularly if you can sell power back to the grid at peak tariff rates during peak hours.
Most people: batteries are a waste of effort that don’t save you money, plus they have the added thrill of being a non-zero risk source of a signifianct fire.
It also serves the purpose of a generator, and with solar you might be able to cut your grid draw to basically zero
The fire risk is generally overstated, plus different battery tech, like sodium, are much less flammable. Weight and size are much less of an issue, so as adoption increases they’re going to get much cheaper and longer lasting as production ramps up
Not to mention it does meaningfully reduce load on the grid with increased adoption. Not everything needs to be financially min-maxed… If you’ve got the money, it’s a good thing to invest in
If you want the battery bank for grid independence, it’ll do that
We have a little battery (1200Wh) that will run the refrigerator overnight, so if a storm is on the way we set that in-line incase the power goes out, don’t worry about the freezer - we can get the gasoline generator cranked up in the morning if needed. They call it a generator, it’s as heavy as a generator, but only outputs the power that you get from about 8 ounces of gasoline before it’s needing a recharge.