Clever system to spread the energy demand!

Wondering if this is still possible if all cars are electric like planed.

Quote from r.hellenbrand

Some calculations:

According CBS does the Netherlands uses:

https://opendata.cbs.nl/statli…ED/table?ts=1626354724791

Buildings 380,3Pj = 105,6TWh / year

Traffic 374,6Pj = 104TWh / year

Efficiency of an electric drive is around 95%

Efficiency patrol cars is around 40%

So the complete traffic needs 0.42*104TWh = 43,68TWh

Total electric energy that need to be transported if none fossil is used for home heating is 104+43,68= 149,28TWh

In the Netherlands we have 263679 streets, so amps though every street cable will be:

149,28TWh /365 days /263679 streets / 24h/ 3phase / 2 street cables /230V = 46,8A

This is a 24/7 average current to coverage the needed power.

Peek currents during winter will be a factor 4-5 bigger?

And on top we have the quick chargers for cars,…

You need real big cable diameters to handle this power, think not possible.

And in the calculation we still miss the industry (just buildings and traffic), assume they will get their own power grid.

This is why I think the electrification will not be possible!

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Yes - with EVs we will need larger total supply capacity

Yes - with C/1 charge in high range cars you'd need a 3 phase home supply. But a standard single-phase supply (in UK) can manage 200A @ 240V which is not bad. As others have pointed out home charging is do it overnight., A lot of people use cheap night rates

No - high peak individual charge currents are not much of a problem for the grid - they get averaged over multiple houses. In fact they are an advantage for the grid if smart demand-management technologies can be used. these are clearly suitable for a "charge it overnight" scenario which is typical.

Yes - Local grid demand for multi-car charging stations (replacement of petrol stations) is very challenging

Here is are two tech reasons why things are getting better.

• EV range at high ranges depends critically on energy/weight ratio of batteries. With lighter batteries the costs of accelerating and deccellerating, which scale with weight, are smaller. This has been getting better with new battery tech, and will continue to do so. There is feedback here so reducing battery weight is virtuous. and with higher efficiency you need less energy input for given range.
• The fundamental limit of air resistance cannot be got round except by going slower. Luckily - auto driving and pervasive internet means we are getting closer to a scenario where you can work in car as well as in office, and makes slower journeys (e.g. 50mph not 70mph) much more reasonable. I know it is not what we used to love about car journeys - but things change. Cars will seem more like train journeys, but with more privacy, and more convenient.

In the UK EVs have gone from being less good than IC and virtuous, to being better than IC and virtuous - but too expensive and problems with away-from-home charging infrastructure. The cost problem is one that will be solved. National Grid seems to think that the needed grid upgrades will be OK (and remember that large bonus of demand-side load balancing using intelligent charging). The interconnect capacity you need without demand-side load management is much larger for given average load than what you need with demand-side load management.

Quote from r.hellenbrand

Clever system to spread the energy demand!

Wondering if this is still possible if all cars are electric like planed.

Yes, as long as it takes no more than ~8 hours to recharge a car, most people will do it overnight. Especially if the power company offers a big discount.

Of course a small number of people will recharge during the day. For example, when they are driving a long distance on the highway. Or when they forgot to recharge at night and realize at 7:00 a.m. that the car does not have enough charge to get to the office. I did that!

The power company wants to keep the discount as small as possible. As I said, in Atlanta they charge $0.20/kWh during the day and $0.01/kWh at night. I doubt that discount will remain on the books for long. I expect they will make it $0.10 or more. If I were them, I would gradually raise the rate until many customers decide to recharge during the day. I am assuming the power company will have remote control over electric vehicle chargers and it will know you are recharging a car. They keep saying they will have remote control. They will offer a discount for this capability too. You will not have to have it, but they will give you a discount if you agree to it. Some power companies already offer reduced rates if you let them turn off your air conditioning during peak demand. See:

Quote from JedRothwell

Or when they forgot to recharge at night and realize at 7:00 a.m. that the car does not have enough charge to get to the office. I did that!

"Oops! I forgot to plug in the car. I better call an Uber." -- very 21st century. In 1980 no one would have known what you were talking about. Like uploading a backup to the cloud.

Fascinated to provide almost free energy during the night, just to not power down their power plants.

Sorry but promoting using more and more energy this way, has nothing to do with CO2 reduction.

Just to get an indication about how much amps cables are rated, look at this table:

http://www.kei-ind.com/images/pdf/lt-cables/4core-aluminium-pvc-armoured.pdf

In many streets we only have 50mm2 cables rated for 110A

In the past they often installed 95mm2 rated for 165A

Mine street has only a 10mm2 cable, and in February the heat pump of mine neighbour managed to drop the voltage under the net limit.

After complains we now get a 150mm2, but still the power rating is 210A.

So charging @200A would be the limit for the complete street (150mm2 cable)!

Quote from r.hellenbrand

Fascinated to provide almost free energy during the night, just to not power down their power plants.

Sorry but promoting using more and more energy this way, has nothing to do with CO2 reduction.

Just to get an indication about how much amps cables are rated, look at this table:

http://www.kei-ind.com/images/…luminium-pvc-armoured.pdf

In many streets we only have 50mm2 cables rated for 110A

In the past they often installed 95mm2 rated for 165A

Mine street has only a 10mm2 cable, and in February the heat pump of mine neighbour managed to drop the voltage under the net limit.

After complains we now get a 150mm2, but still the power rating is 210A.

So charging @200A would be the limit for the complete street (150mm2 cable)!

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Yes, I was misremembering.

You can have a 100A fuse for a "standard" single phase 15kW ( 65A) home single phase supply.

Quote from r.hellenbrand

So charging @200A would be the limit for the complete street (150mm2 cable)!

I do not know if this would be a problem in Europe. In the U.S., most houses have things like central air conditioning (3.5 kW) and electric clothes dryers (2 to 6 kW). The highest power electric vehicle charger you can get in Atlanta is 7.5 kW (30 amps at 240 V). So, turning it on at night is like turning on both your air conditioner and your clothes dryer. I am sure that would not be a problem for our distribution system, since many houses have both of these machines turned on during the day, but few have them running constantly at night.

Along the same lines, most people with an electric car do not need to recharge every night. The daily distance they drive to commute is probably less than the full range of the car. I say that because it would be nerve-wracking to drive the car home every day with the battery nearly exhausted. A driver will want a vehicle that can go for several days without recharging. So, not everyone on the block will recharge the same night. To put it another way, the average commute in the U.S. is 32 miles per day. The average electric car consumes 0.3 kWh per mile, so that's 9.6 kWh per day. With a 7.5 kW charger, that would take an hour and 15 minutes per day per car. I don't know how many houses you have per block with your 200 A distribution cable. I expect the average street in Atlanta has much more than 200 A. Houses in Atlanta must now have 100 A capacity to meet code. (My house had to be upgraded to 100 A.) Of course that does not mean the power company can deliver 100 A to every single house at the same time, but it does mean we consume a lot of power in the U.S. We have pole-mount transformers on just about every block. Their capacity is 200 A, 300 A peak.

So, anyway, I am confident we could recharge at least 10 cars at one time. Over an 8-hour night, that's 60 cars per night (for the average commuting distance of 32 miles). As I said, the power company is supposed to offer remote control over the chargers, so it can ensure that no more than 10 cars are being recharged at a time.

100A is huge!

In the Netherlands a 1x35A or 3x25A is standard.

You can upgrade to 1x40A or 3x80A

My house in the UK is 40A, my place in France 6kW, my son's house in deeply rural France 3kW. And that is not unusual.

Maybe the biggest difference is the amount of transformers!

Here we have one transformer for several streets.

See primary side of these transformers are 7200V, explains a lot why they can deliver more power.

Here we supply with one transformer 10kV to 230V several streets.

Cables (230V) are quite long from this transformer to the streets.

Quote from r.hellenbrand

100A is huge!

I thought so. It seems excessive, but that's what the building codes say. My house had a much lower 1950s rating. I don't recall what it was. I called the electrician in to get a fast car charger. He showed me where the old wiring was a corroded mess that had scorched the walls. He was not allowed to install a charger or anything else with such old wiring. The panel and everything up to it is now brand new.

Atlanta codes also specify you have to have a hardwired smoke and CO detector in every bedroom. That cost a lot of money too.

Sorry..not green... but thorium makes green glass

China adding finishing touches to world-first thorium nuclear reactor

China adding finishing touches to world-first thorium nuclear reactor

China is moving ahead with development of an experimental reactor that would be the first of its kind in the world, but could prove key to the pursuit of clean…

newatlas.com

maybe it is a scheme to get rid of thorium waste?

Quote from RobertBryant

Sorry..not green... but thorium makes green glass

China adding finishing touches to world-first thorium nuclear reactor

https://newatlas.com/energy/ch…-thorium-nuclear-reactor/

maybe it is a scheme to get rid of thorium waste?

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I for one am finding curious that after so much time and much accusations of being a conspiracy theorist for stating that the lack of interest in LFTR was because it did not produce plutonium and thus the military did not allow to move forward this technology, now all of this is actually becoming talked about openly.

A few days ago I had linked here in this thread a post on Medium about the same topic, that also admitted the military intervention as if it was nothing outrageous and kind of normal to talk about. Last night I watched a video from YouTuber Anton Petrov openly talking about the same reasons.

So I guess we will have to accept and swallow the argument that We are 70 years late on this technology because we are simply a race of myopic war prone monkeys that couldn’t do better. SMH.

Quote from Curbina

we are simply a race of myopic war prone monkeys

SPAWAR  NAVWAR might like aThorium reactor for submarines

it sounds more warlike.

just hide the "Made in China" label

Is some LENR there too.?

welding rods plus deuterium..

XS heat or just radium?

any prediction?

Quote from RobertBryant

XS heat or just radium?

This is definitely not green technology... but its crazy..

Halflives are supposed to be invariant.. but not for humans

I shall write to Yakshma Sheiksta quickly

Here is a somewhat more up-to-date graph of energy flows for the U.S. As you see, in 2014 transportation took 27.1 quads (mostly petroleum, 24.8 quads). Assuming electric cars are 4 times more efficient, it would take 6.8 quads of primary energy, all else being equal. (But it is not equal, as I describe below.) The electric power companies consumed 38.4 quads of primary energy, and delivered 12.4 quads of useful energy. If every gasoline vehicle was converted to electricity, it would have to deliver more, but not that much more. The power companies might not be able to do this today, even if all the electricity were delivered at night. However, the transition to electric cars will take a long time; probably decades. The power companies can gradually increase capacity and fuel supplies to handle the increased demand.

Note that the 27.1 quads of transportation energy converts to 5.68 quads of useful energy. That's 21% efficiency. Electric power conversion starts with 38.4 quads and converts to 12.4 quads; 32% efficiency. This is the efficiency of fossil fuel thermal plants. It does not make much sense applied to nuclear, hydro, wind or geothermal, but the authors of this chart applied that 32% to all inputs. As I recall, I discussed this with them. They agreed the "conversion efficiency" does not really apply to hydro or wind, but they said this is an approximation. Anyway, electric cars are 95% efficient starting from electricity, because batteries are efficient, the motors work well at low speeds or high speeds, and the cars have regenerative braking. They are roughly 4 times more efficient than gasoline cars. So it would take approximately 5.68 quads divided by 4 = 1.2 quads of delivered electricity, which translates into ~3.8 quads of primary energy. So the power companies would need 38.4 + 3.8 = 42.2 quads of primary energy. Fuel, that is. But not really, because they get a lot of energy from wind, hydro and solar, which have no fuel input. They get about 8.4% from wind.

Here is the latest 2020 chart.

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Energy/Energy_2020_United-States.png

Now only 0.02 quads is electric transport and in 2014 it was 0.0265.

I also see the CNG and LNG (bio and natural gas) part of transport is quite big in the US.

Is CNG and LNG common used?

Do see US is switched from coal to neutral gas compared with 2014.

You say it takes decades to switch to electric cars, here in Europe the last petrol car will be sold in 2030, don’t know how they want to upgrade the grid in just 9 years,...

New Iron Air Battery.

China Battery Breakthrough

New report from our friends at CSER.

Tapping the potential of NDCs and LT-LEDS to address fossil fuel production.

https://cdn.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/tapping-the-potential-of-ndcs-and-ltleds-to-address-fossil-fuel-production.pdf