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posted by martyb on Monday November 07 2016, @07:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the power-to-the-people['s-car] dept.

http://www.reuters.com/article/gm-bolt-idUSL1N1D51Z2

General Motors Co is ramping up production of Chevrolet Bolt electric cars at a factory north of Detroit and is on track to start delivering vehicles as promised by the end of the year, company officials said on Friday.

Barring a last-minute stumble, GM will be first to offer an electric car with more than 200 miles of driving range at a starting price of less than $40,000 before tax credits. Silicon Valley electric car maker Tesla has said its entry in this new market segment, the Model 3, will launch next year.

Also at Business Insider and ABC.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @07:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @07:30PM (#423707)

    Right now a lot of our electricity comes from burning fuels. I feel like we are pushing electrics too soon, the waste from energy conversion will be phenomenal if we have a big transition to electric cars. Is an incremental transition better? Or should we wait till we have more sustainable power plants?

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by KilroySmith on Monday November 07 2016, @07:53PM

    by KilroySmith (2113) on Monday November 07 2016, @07:53PM (#423718)

    Good question.

    A lot of EV owners end up getting an off-peak rate from their electric company and charging at night. That saves the owner money, but also tends to rely on getting electrons from base-load electrical generation. For me, the electrons I'll be using to charge (after midnight) will most likely be coming from the Nuclear plant next door, or the hydroelectric plants on the Colorado. Daytime (peak) electrical demand around here is generally fueled from natural-gas fired plants with relatively low pollution but a bunch of CO2. Regardless, utility-scale electrical power generation from fossil fuels, transmission, and car charging is significantly more efficient than refining, transporting, and burning fuel in an ICE vehicle. Even if the current electrical generation mix doesn't change, electric cars are a win for CO2 and smog reduction. And a 200 mile electric car with 6.5 second 0-60 times is a great way to win over the people who didn't like a Prius.

    With the rise of "green" power generation, I think this is the right time for a complete overhaul of transportation towards EV's. Rooftop solar makes economic sense, and will quickly provide the "peaking" power needed to obsolete natural gas plants. Renewable energy was more than 50% of the new capacity installed last year. It's still difficult to charge your personal vehicle with your home solar if you commute to work with it, but Tesla's PowerWall is a step in that direction, although you'd need to install multiple depending on your daily power usage.

    In ten years, EV's will be the majority of new cars sold although it may take 50 years to essentially eliminate fuel usage from all new vehicles.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 07 2016, @08:09PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday November 07 2016, @08:09PM (#423726)

      As we just changed our clocks, we're reminded that one of the electricity peaks is around or after sunset. Solar is great, but we either need a superconducting link a few thousand km to our West (can hawaii power the West coast?), or local production and storage that can accommodate charging for long trips even during consecutive stormy days.
      In a nutshell, gas plants aren't going away because the cost of peak and "in case" is prohibitive if not distributed between the potential users.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 07 2016, @08:35PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday November 07 2016, @08:35PM (#423732) Journal

        Rooftop solar can handle residential needs pretty well. Most of us aren't running smelters in our backyards. And if Germany, whose insolation is worse than ours (think the bright sunny weather you get in Seattle), can do OK with it the US can too.

        To that there's also wind. Wind farms are sprouting up everywhere. You see the turbines in Rhode Island as well as across the Great Plains. The Columbia River Gorge alone could probably power the Pacific Northwest with the constant powerful winds that howl along it.

        I haven't seen what the theoretical solar & wind potential is in the United States, but I'm sure somebody has and I'm certain we're nowhere close to that limit. An updated grid would help smooth out local/regional supply/demand fluctuations; that's something the federal government would have to take on because corporations won't undertake that kind of investment on their own.

        After all that is done, it's likely nuclear can fill in the gaps.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @08:44PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @08:44PM (#423740)

          I thought nuclear fixed the gap. Permanently :P

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @09:37PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @09:37PM (#423767)

          Is Germany doing OK? I thought they were just importing the power they need from the outside.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:26PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:26PM (#423840)

            Depends on how you define "OK". Basically we are fucking up our neighbors' nets by overproducing electricity during hours of low demand and keep burning coal (including mercury-releasing lignite) the rest of the day. Solar seems to be falling out of fashion a bit now that all the panel production has moved to China and subsidies have been reduced, but wind turbines keep getting built even on low hilltops in the midst of relatively remote forests and near habitats of endangered birds and bats. Low interest rates have helped to create a market for project development companies that collect money from local investors with sometimes overly optimistic estimates of local wind conditions, while the grid topology is still dominated by current or recent locations of conventional large-scale powerplants. High-tension lines from the already operational North Sea wind farms to the economic and population centers in the south have yet to be built and are facing strong opposition despite a recent decision to use buried cables instead of overhead lines. In all this is more a lobbyist clusterfuck than a thought-out engineering plan. Pessimists keep warning of brown-outs but the last couple of winters have been rather mild.

            • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @12:39AM

              by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @12:39AM (#423860) Journal

              I have thought from reading Stratfor that a big reason for the Energiewende is that it makes Germany less vulnerable to interruption in the Russian gas supply. Is any of that perceived on the ground in Germany, or talked about in academic- and professional circles?

              --
              Washington DC delenda est.
              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:46AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @08:46AM (#423976)

                Not likely as long as there is no large-scale storage for energy sources that peak at inconvenient times. Without appropriate battery systems, best you can do is pump up water into some large artificial lake in the mountains and release it through a series of hydroelectric powerplants when needed (few such pumped-storage facilities exist, building more is not popular with the affected locals). As far as I know, the potential supply problem with natural gas is not that only the Russians have it, rather nobody built significant pipeline capacity across the other borders or LNG tanker facilities in major ports as it is not economic as long as the Russian supply is there.
                As I see it, Energiewende is mostly a combination of somewhat irrational public opinion about nuclear energy and creating an artificial economic sector.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @04:09AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 08 2016, @04:09AM (#423920)

          > I haven't seen what the theoretical solar & wind potential is in the United States,

          Wind capacity, for off-shore alone, is over 4,200 gigawatts. [cleantechnica.com] To put that in perspective, our current capacity is roughly 1,000 gigawatts [eia.gov] and our levels of consumption is holding steady (improved efficiencies are mostly balancing increasing numbers of users).

      • (Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Monday November 07 2016, @10:29PM

        by KilroySmith (2113) on Monday November 07 2016, @10:29PM (#423794)

        You're right.

        Natural gas fired plants won't be shut down in the foreseeable future because of their flexibility and ability to fill in "holes" in generation due to demand or due to supply disruption (like when the wind dies at sunset... and electric generation has a major wind and solar component).

        It'll be interesting to see what the electric grid (and electric generation) looks like 20 years from now:
        https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-the-utility-death-spiral-looks-like [greentechmedia.com]

        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 08 2016, @12:47AM

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 08 2016, @12:47AM (#423862) Journal

          Great article, that affirms things I saw a couple years ago about renewables chopping off the positive side of the utility profit curve. Don't you love how one of the ways the utilities are trying to cope is "by working on the consumer level to implement services like home automation?" I think they'll find that that will never help them as much as the vampire load of dumb appliances has. But it does rather indicate that one thing they ought to be doing is whatever they can to push people to switch to EVs. That way they can cannibalize the oil industry's profits in a bid to save their own. Bet it would, too.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by hamsterdan on Monday November 07 2016, @10:35PM

    by hamsterdan (2829) on Monday November 07 2016, @10:35PM (#423801)

    Depends where. Here in Quebec it's mostly hydro-electrical, and I think we might still operate a couple nuclear plants. Some parts of the world use nuclear too. Besides, even a coal or gas plant is *way* more efficient at generating power than a car engine. As someone else said, solar roofs can take care of generating power too.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Aiwendil on Monday November 07 2016, @11:16PM

      by Aiwendil (531) on Monday November 07 2016, @11:16PM (#423831) Journal

      Last Quebecian nuclear power reactor (Gentilly-2) shut down in 2012. So right now the only canadian nuclear power plant/reactor outside Ontario* is Point Lepreau in New Brunswick.

      Kinda sad how Gentilly-2 got shut down

      (* = Ontario has three nuclear sites/plants with a combined total of 18 operating reactors)

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 09 2016, @02:34PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday November 09 2016, @02:34PM (#424625) Journal

    Right now a lot of our electricity comes from burning fuels. I feel like we are pushing electrics too soon, the waste from energy conversion will be phenomenal if we have a big transition to electric cars. Is an incremental transition better? Or should we wait till we have more sustainable power plants?

    Even if all of the electricity is coming from coal it's still an improvement -- although I think just about everyone is going to have a fair bit of renewables in the mix these days. But a few big centralized generators are gonna beat a million distributed small engines every time anyway.

    First of all because car engines just aren't that efficient. A power plant is going to be built to burn that fuel as efficiently as possible. Cars are designed for efficiency, but they've got other constraints to worry about too. The more efficient the engine, the less horsepower you have available. And the engine/transmission/emission reduction systems have to be small and light and mobile, which power plants don't need to worry about. Plus it's easier to handle pollution if it's all coming out of one stack instead of hundreds of tailpipes.

    A typical car ICE is below 30% efficient. An older coal power plant might be around 33%, but modern combined cycle generators get up to 60%. Line losses are only around 6%, and the efficiency of electric car motors are around 85-95%. The worst power plant against the worst ICE, you end up with around 27% for the power plant and 25% for the car. The best power plant/electric against the best ICE, you end up with around 50% for the power plant and 30% for the car. Make it a hybrid and that car might hit 40%.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Internal_combustion_engines [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station [wikipedia.org]
    https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3 [eia.gov]
    https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/ [wordpress.com]

    For a real-world example, look at the existing Chevy Volt, which gets 37MPG when running purely using a gas generator to generate electricity to drive an electric motor. The Chevy Malibu gets up to 30MPG driving the wheels directly from a gas engine, or 40MPG as a hybrid. Even a tiny crappy gas generator converting to electric to drive a motor can beat a pure ICE vehicle in efficiency...