The numbers don’t pencil out for the future where just 25% of cars in California would be electric.
On September 23, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that will ban the sale of gasoline-powered cars in the Golden State by 2035. Ignoring the hard lessons of this past summer, when California’s solar- and wind-reliant electric grid underwent rolling blackouts, Newsom now adds a huge new burden to the grid in the form electric vehicle charging. If California officials follow through and enforce Newsom’s order, the result will be a green new car version of a train wreck.
Let’s run some numbers. According to Statista, there are more than 15 million vehicles registered in California. Per the U.S. Department of Energy, there are only 256,000 electric vehicles registered in the state—just 1.7 percent of all vehicles.
Using the Tesla Model3 mid-range model as a baseline for an electric car, you’ll need to use about 62 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of power to charge a standard range Model 3 battery to full capacity. It will take about eight hours to fully charge it at home using the standard Tesla NEMA 14-50 charger.
Now, let’s assume that by 2040, five years after the mandate takes effect, also assuming no major increase in the number of total vehicles, California manages to increase the number of electric vehicles to 25 percent of the total vehicles in the state. If each vehicle needs an average of 62 kilowatt-hours for a full charge, then the total charging power required daily would be 3,750,000 x 62 KWh, which equals 232,500,000 KWh, or 232.5 gigawatt-hours (GWh) daily.
Utility-scale California solar electric generation according to the energy.ca.gov puts utility-scale solar generation at about 30,000 GWh per year currently. Divide that by 365 days and we get 80 GWh/day, predicted to double, to 160 GWh /day. Even if we add homeowner rooftop solar, about half the utility-scale, at 40 GWh/day we come up to 200 GW/h per day, still 32 GWh short of the charging demand for a 25% electric car fleet in California. Even if rooftop solar doubles by 2040, we are at break-even, with 240GWh of production during the day.
Bottom-line, under the most optimistic best-case scenario, where solar operates at 100% of rated capacity (it seldom does), it would take every single bit of the 2040 utility-scale solar and rooftop capacity just to charge the cars during the day. That leaves nothing left for air conditioning, appliances, lighting, etc. It would all go to charging the cars, and that’s during the day when solar production peaks.
But there’s a much bigger problem. Even a grade-schooler can figure out that solar energy doesn’t work at night, when most electric vehicles will be charging at homes. So, where does Newsom think all this extra electric power is going to come from?
The wind? Wind power lags even further behind solar power. According to energy.gov, as of 2019, California had installed just 5.9 gigawatts of wind power generating capacity. This is because you need large amounts of land for wind farms, and not every place is suitable for high-return wind power.
In 2040, to keep the lights on with 25 percent of all vehicles in California being electric, while maintaining the state mandate requiring all the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free resources by 2045, California would have to blanket the entire state with solar and wind farms. It’s an impossible scenario. And the problem of intermittent power and rolling blackouts would become much worse.
And it isn’t just me saying this. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agrees. In a letter sent by EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to Gavin Newsom on September 28, Wheeler wrote:
“[It] begs the question of how you expect to run an electric car fleet that will come with significant increases in electricity demand, when you can’t even keep the lights on today.
“The truth is that if the state were driving 100 percent electric vehicles today, the state would be dealing with even worse power shortages than the ones that have already caused a series of otherwise preventable environmental and public health consequences.”
California’s green new car wreck looms large on the horizon. Worse, can you imagine electric car owners’ nightmares when California power companies shut off the power for safety reasons during fire season? Try evacuating in your electric car when it has a dead battery.
Gavin Newsom’s “no more gasoline cars sold by 2035” edict isn’t practical, sustainable, or sensible. But isn’t that what we’ve come to expect with any and all of these Green New Deal-lite schemes?
I acknowledge the help of Willis Eschenbach in checking the numbers for this article.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. He is also an owner of an electric vehicle in California.
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“…Bottom-line, under the most optimistic best-case scenario, where solar operates at 100% of rated capacity (it seldom does), it would take every single bit of the 2040 utility-scale solar and rooftop capacity just to charge the cars during the day…”
With all this number crunching, I was wondering what kind of capacity factor for all those panels we are talking about here. If it is 100%, the picture being painted here is one of a potential total disaster even if the 100% capacity factor is achieved on rare ocassion. More like 30-40% on a regular basis I would guess.
The biggest impediment to human well-being and progress is its own stupidity.
So California doesn’t have enough electricity now but wants everybody to drive electric cars? Will people drive to Utah to get a recharge?
Vehicles are a commodity sold in interstate commerce. No state has the power to regulate interstate commerce, that is solely the purview of the federal government. States can tax the sale of the commodity or even charge for licensing the ownership of the commodity but it can’t prevent interstate commerce from being carried out.
The first time a Ford dealer in CA imports a new Ford F-250 ICE pickup from Michigan and sells it to a CA resident Newsome is going to find the federal government sitting on his chest asking just what in Pete’s name he’s doing screwing around with interstate commerce.
Interestingly, Ford is introducing a hybrid F-150 next year. Evidently, it is pretty awesome in terms of power and performance. It also has, standard, an auxiliary electric generator that you can use to power a work site, or a camp site, or even your house in the event of a power failure. The generator will run 2 weeks, IIRC, on a full tank of gas. If the article is correct, this generator will be standard equipment on all Ford trucks. My understanding is that this is a plug-in hybrid, so it will be far more flexible than a straight plug-in electric.
A great way to deal with the 10 years of PSPS’s the state has planned for those of us who live in the foothills! Dragging our large Honda generator off the porch is getting to be rather old.
Wonder if BMW is going working on a way to get their I3 rex to provide VTH power…
Have made one basic error in your assumptions. That is not all cars will recharge every day. T
Perhaps (on average), every five days would e realistic.
Your basic concept is correct of course. I think you need to redo the numbers.
I suspect most people will train themselves to recharge every night. If they don’t train themselves to do that then the likelihood of forgetting to recharge when one is needed goes way up. That could mean anything from not being able to get to work in the morning to not being able to evacuate when the next fire gets close to being in the middle of a blackout and unable to charge when you need to so (darn! I should have recharged yesterday!)
It may not matter much to an urbanite but out here in rural America you learn to keep your tank topped off. You never know when you will need it and its a long walk to the gas station. It won’t be any different with an EV except there won’t be any walking to a charging station to get a bucket of electricity.
The fallacy of this article is that it someone or something will still work in California under a Newsome regime.
I cannot afford any of this. I need the State of California to provide me with, free of charge, two electric cars and three roof top solar energy systems installed at three different houses. The solar energy systems must include batteries so that the electric cars can be changed at night. The cars must have enough batteries to provide at least a 500 mile range. The state must pay for all of this but I will end up owning it all free from any additional property taxes. I am sure that all of California’s problems will be solved as soon as high speed rail service is provided between Bakersfield and Fresno neither of which are cities that I plan to travel to or through.
I have no doubt this plan is wholly impracticable and I hope the people of the state have the sense not to stand for it. However in fairness I do understand that most EVs are not in need of a full recharge every day as most people don’t drive that many daily miles, so the daily charge load of a 25% fleet wouldnt be quite as high as the 232.5 Gw per day assumed. (apologies if this point has already been made above)
During the frequent “Flex Alert” incidents this summer, CalISO and the local utilities (Edison, DWP) have been telling us not to charge EVs as well as not using AC, refrigerators, washer/dryer, dishwashers, and basically any electricity when the temps are in the 100s. It gets hot every summer and it seems a terrific dilemma when solar is generating at its highest capacity whilst utility agencies are telling us to not use the electricity.
It seems a few agencies are thinking of ways to deal with the excess energy being generated behind the meter.
http://www.caiso.com/Documents/BusinessRequirementsSpecification-ExcessBehindtheMeterProduction.pdf
Some bad ideas never die, they just get recycled.
Governor Newsome’s directive is one of these bad ideas.
Old Planning Engineer has given here the Australian view accurately from an engineering standpoint.
From the perspective of the man in the street, the Australian experience is worth noting.
Before the last Federal Election in May 2019 the Opposition Australian Labor Party announced to much fanfare its policy for electric cars as part of its environmental policies.
These included a commitment to have 50% electric vehicles in the country by 2030.
A fund of A57 million dollars (!) was set aside for R&D to achieve this.
The Government opposed the scheme as impractical, enormously expensive and overriding personal choice.
After considerable public ridicule, the leader of the Opposition was driven to acknowledging that the policy was merely “aspirational”.
His inability to give any credible costing for Labor’s environmental policy to combat climate change and his attacks ( or silence) on the Indian owned Adani coal mine in Queensland are widely seen as a major reason for Labor losing the Federal election.
However Australia is not California where as the California Institute of Public Policy records (see this thread) some 77% of Californians support nearly every idea from Governor Newsome to reduce fossil fuel emissions etc. and support the environment no matter the cost.
That assumes that the State bears the cost or only a minimal personal cost is involved.
Anthony and Willis you need to redo your math.
Those Statista figures are off by a mile. According to the CA DMV there were over 26 million cars and over 6 million trucks registered in the state in 2019. I would bet there’s close to 100,000 or more across the state that aren’t registered so that number could be added too. I’ve seen numerous cars/PU trucks in CA that have expired plates with some of them being expired beyond a year.
In this CA DMV link they say the figures are estimates but I bet they are very close to the actual numbers or at least much, much closer than what Statista is indicating.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/uploads/2020/06/2019-Estimated-Vehicles-Registered-by-County-1.pdf
Great post regardless.
Such a nice phrase that just sounds so good…
The last time I dug into the various reports seeking where and what “homeowner rooftop solar” is and how it is counted was very disappointing.
A) The majority of “homeowner rooftop solar” is thermal. i.e. used to heat water. Government has formulae to convert their estimates of solar thermal into comparable BTU.
B) Once installed, “homeowner rooftop solar” exists and produces forever. There is no such thing as failed/removed/inoperable etc.
That is; government entities use “homeowner rooftop solar” coupled with incremental increases to fill out their “solar” claims.
Unless “homeowner rooftop solar” is specifically identified as generating electricity to charge vehicles and used to calculate any portion of supplying the required “232.5 gigawatt-hours (GWh) daily.”.
” If each vehicle needs an average of 62 kilowatt-hours for a full charge, then the total charging power required daily would be 3,750,000 x 62 KWh, which equals 232,500,000 KWh, or 232.5 gigawatt-hours (GWh) daily.”
I’m sure someone has pointed out that this implies an annual mileage of 80000 miles for every EV. This does not seem likely.
You get exactly the same numbers if rather than the 25% fleet being fully charged every night, then there was a 100% fleet (like mandated) which was fully charged every 4th night.
And it takes a lot more than 62kWh power from the grid to fully charge a 62kWh battery from flat, especially if it is rapid charged.
You might find the following articles of some interest.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/u-k-net-zero-emissions-target-costly-little-gain/
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2020/07/The-Battery-Car-Delusion.pdf
As a retired engineer for an electric utility, I really enjoy the attempt at calculations and the use o magical phrases like “reduce climate change”, “just add charging at work..”, or the all time favorite “the government will do it!”
If the goal is “climate change”, show the amount of CO2 reduced for every “fix” AND the temperature reduction expected at the local, state, Or USA level WITH all associated costs of continuing 24/7 reliable electric service…NO magic or hidden costs!
$ / action= T reduction (local,state, USA)
Compile in a table , with notations of methods, sources
Perhaps we can all contribute a list of actions and cost elements… under action, claimed costs, missing or hidden costs, who pays, etc..by T reduction( local, state, USA, earth)
You’re welcome.
Feel free to begin.
Volunteers to compile?
I am also a retired electric utility engineer, and I am amused by the simplistic assumptions that go into these exercises.
Build 100,000 plus wind turbines? No consideration of the massive demand on resources such as concrete, steel, copper, rare earth elements, plastics, etc. All of these resources require fossil fuels and vast mining operations to produce. And basing assumptions on “average” power production is meaningless. Wind turbines spend 5% to 15% of the time producing at or near full rated output, which is about 4 times the “average ” production. This which would flood the grid with excess power. And 10% to 30% of the time producing nothing. As in Zero. And furthermore, the dispatchability or ability to schedule this variable output is also near Zero.
PV Solar is the same- producing power on average about 40% of the hours in a day (assuming no clouds) with a mid- day peak at rated output. The other 60% of the time output is nothing. As in Zero. At least this daily cycle is relatively predictable, except for weather related impacts- which could turn a promising day into- again- near Zero. And Solar panels make their own unique demands on resources.
Do not even think of batteries to solve this problem. Stored energy would need to be sufficient to support the grid for 5- 7- 10 days if we are to maintain a modern secure standard of living. That much battery capacity would require orders of magnitude more resources than the wind and solar systems they would serve. And the energy to recharge them would need to come from somewhere. The times when wind and solar “overproduce” would likely not be enough, so even more generating capacity would be required.
The only practical backup solution would be fossil fuel plants on standby to provide on short notice the reserve power needed. They can easily store in solid, liquid, or gas forms the fuel needed for any period of backup required. This is how they are designed to operate.
This describes exactly the type of plants which California is planning to shut down.
Insanity.
Sorry I’m just a lowly physicist, but I tried to follow. And I believe you’ve both left out perhaps the biggest most crucial point. Wind turbines and solar panels NEVER EVEN OFFSET the energy required to make and install them. So at the end of the day the entire net result of all of these ridiculous schemes would be USING MORE ENERGY THAN YOU WOULD HAVE USED IN ANY OTHER SCENARIO. And generating more CO2.
Only one thing you can say to that:
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha…California!
…”In barely one generation, that California was swept away and transformed into a left-liberal one-party state, the most economically unequal and socially divided in the country, ostensibly run by a cadre of would-be Solons in Sacramento and in the courts, but really by oligarchic power concentrated in a handful of industries, above all Big Tech and Big Hollywood.”
https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2020/10/02/be_afraid_very_afraid_579516.html
Uh, you mean the 6th happiest US state? THAT state?
https://wallethub.com/edu/happiest-states/6959/
We winter on the central coast every year, and sure makes US happy.
Feel free to push for the state to divide up into 3. But equal populations, please. What we don’t need is 4 more senators representing way less than an order of magnitude of US residents than others. We are already regressed enough by the “Every 10 acres gets a vote” electoral college….
Yeah but those people are just happy to not be in the third world shithole they immigrated from illegally. This is not happiness by any real standard. How many ‘Americans’ live in California? Fewer every day.
How many ‘Americans’ live in California? Fewer every day.”
Read back and see the trend I posted of undocs into Cal. It’s DOWN. The leavers are them, and US citizens with a BS or less. Yes, the Cal population will flatten, but that’s the way it should be. Cal is brightsizing, and will becauseof AGW, they can no longer support the flight to Cal wilderness areas. The remainders – the best and brightest of us from all over the world – will just get happier and happier.
But if you’re happier in a 5000 ft^2 “bargain” McMansion in Texas, next to smoldering fertilizer factory, in the midst of the carcinogenic corridor, KYSO. Must admit, gas is cheaper there. As for me, SO happy that my g’kids are getting raised in the SF bay area. They already academically outshine their Missouri 2nd cousins…..
I would be curious to see an analysis of how the “work from home” crowd, which is steadily increasing, would factor into the demand equations. I live in FL, but only a recent transplant from the the NE. I lived in the Peoples Democratic Republic of New York for 18 years, where I commuted to Midtown mostly by rail.
But the point I want to make is that, as of now, and due in equal parts to Cover, Antifa/BLM, and the communist mayor’s response to all, people are fleeing, specifically those that make the city economically viable – office workers. Everyone is “working from home” now, which many employers realized was actually a cost saving boon. 20 years ago, if you got 1-2 mb/sec of download speed, you were lucky, but you still couldn’t have sustained a Zoom meeting at those low speeds. Today 20 mb/s is considered low end, it ranges, depending on venue, infrastructure and relative demand, 30mb – 90mb. More than enough to sustain a Zoom meeting with a few dozen people at a time.
Those office spaces in Manhattan are only at about 10% capacity, and no one thinks that is coming back.
A “work from home” person would not need his/her EV for a daily commute, and would draw far less from the grid to sustain it. If the average office workforce in/around the CA urban centers were even 25% work-from-home staff, that would make a significant dent in the equations.
(Even so, just to be clear, I’m not a fan of mad dictators, regardless of what policy is being considered.)
“Covid”, not “Cover”…I missed that on review. Sorry.
If you’ve ever driven I_40 across the Az/NM desert at night you’ve probably seen the endless caravan of semi trucks delivering goods from the East to the West Coast states. You may have a guess what this looks like but until you’ve seen it it’s unimaginable. I’m talking about a solid line of semis, filling both lanes, bumper to bumper in a chain 50-100 miles long. This happens NIGHTLY. Now what is going to happen when every one of those trucks gets stopped and turned away at the border because the trucks run on diesel fuel? Leaving 35 million people without food or basic goods. I’ll tell you the FIRST thing that will happen.
People will eat the governor.
Js there even enough rare earth minerals to supply california ?? and where will tnetax revenue Nausious Newsome currently enjoys for fossil fuels going tocome from?