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posted by martyb on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the plugging-electric-vehicles dept.

The rate at which new technologies get accepted into the mainstream never fails to confuse people. For the longest time, cell phones appeared to be the exclusive domain of yuppies, bankers and drug dealers. And then, suddenly, my mum had one. (No, she doesn't sell drugs.)

Could we see a similar rapid adoption for electric vehicles?

The LA Times reports that Q1 electric car (EV) sales are up 91% in California. Sales of Plug-In Hybrids (PHEV) are up 54% too. This is, of course, only one quarter, from one state, so let's not get too excited. And the actual number of units sold—13,804 EVs and 10,466 PHEVs—is still tiny compared to the 506,745 cars and light trucks sold in the state during the same period. But anyone who knows anything about math can tell you that it doesn't take long for a 91% growth rate to start making serious inroads into a particular market. (Electric car sales in Norway have already reached as high as 37% of new passenger vehicles.)

It's possible the muscle memory developed for cellphones could help with EV adoption, too: plug in the phone at night, plug in the car at night.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:40PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:40PM (#515656)

    Does anyone have any statistics on what percentage of those "electric" cars are being recharged with electricity generated by coal (or other non-renewable, non-clean sources)?

    I'm not sure that using coal (indirectly) is any better than using gasoline.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday May 26 2017, @03:30AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Friday May 26 2017, @03:30AM (#515811) Journal

    If, as I assume, EVs are most often charged at night, coal would provide a greater proportion of the electricity for them than it does for general uses. However, coal plants can't be quickly turned on and off. They burn all night, whether electricity is needed from them or not. They run more efficiently when they are run near full capacity around the clock. Also, it may be true that the inefficiencies in a coal plant, transmission loss in the grid, and losses in an EV's battery and motor are less than those just in an ICE engine.

    That said, California doesn't use much coal, is reducing its usage, and has a Somebody Else's Problem field partially protecting its plants:

    From 2006 through July 2016, 3,463 megawatts (MW) of capacity from imported and in-state coal-fired plants were removed from California’s resource portfolio. By the end of 2015, coal-fired electricity generation plants represented less than 6 percent of the energy used to serve California. About 97 percent of the energy was generated by power plants outside California. Coal-fired generation is expected to serve about 3 percent of California’s electricity consumption by 2024, and this generation is expected to decline to zero by 2026.

    [...]

    California uses less in-state coal-fired electricity generation than most other states. Figure 2 shows that coal continues to be a predominant source of energy throughout the United States with some exceptions such as California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and the northeastern states. California’s in-state coal-fired generation during 2015 was roughly 0.5 percent of the total in-state electricity generation. Of the 48 states that use coal for generation, 15 obtained at least 50 percent of their electricity from coal generation. (Only Rhode Island and Vermont do not have in-state coal-fired generation.) Nonetheless, the nation’s coal-fired generation has been dropping. Just between 2014 and 2015, coal-fired generation went from about 40 percent to about 33 percent of the total national electric generation portfolio.

    -- http://www.energy.ca.gov/renewables/tracking_progress/documents/current_expected_energy_from_coal.pdf [ca.gov]

    The decrease in usage might change, of course.

    /article.pl?sid=16/06/03/1944223 [soylentnews.org]