The Electrek site has an article on Tesla's new mobile supercharger that uses a container-sized battery to supplement fixed Supercharger locations during peak travel times, but the headline is "Tesla deploys new mobile Supercharger powered by Megapack instead of diesel generators".
The automaker is using its smaller "Urban Supercharger" stalls all around the flat trailer on which they also installed a large Megapack.
Interestingly, owners are reporting that the stalls are capable of delivering 125 kW, which is not quite comparable to the new Supercharger V3, but it is impressive power for a mobile station.
[...] This is awesome. Way better than Tesla's previous mobile Supercharger stations, which were often powered by diesel generators.
However, Tesla still needs to charge those Megachargers, but they can potentially connect them to better energy sources than diesel generators.
It will be interesting to see if Tesla starts using more of these.
An obvious question is, which is more efficient--charging a big battery (one hopes from an efficient and clean power source) and then using that battery to charge a bunch of cars, or, charging the cars directly from a diesel generator (which can be pretty efficient, but nothing like a big fixed power plant)?
Are there any Tesla owners here? Have you come across a diesel supercharger, and how did it feel to hook your cool, quiet car up to a noisy, smelly monster?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @02:12PM
might have been a better headline to describe the situation.
The wizard of OZ indeed if the electric source powering your 'clean' car makes the overall environmental load worse than just a typical gas sipper.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 09 2019, @02:14PM (2 children)
Using diesel generators carried on flatbeds to recharge electric cars nullifies the environmental benefit, so it's good they're rectifying it.
It does sound like they need to add charging points to heavily trafficked routes, though, so they can avoid trucking in mobile chargers.
I've thought they should start a charging affiliate program whereby you put a Tesla supercharger on your property and get a small fee, so everybody wins. In fact I was thinking the malls that are dying because people are shopping at Amazon instead should add superchargers to their parking lots. People come in and have to wait 30 minutes for the car to recharge, so they might as well do a little shopping while they wait. That's basically how gas stations make their money these days, from the purchases of soda and snacks while people refuel.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Monday December 09 2019, @04:11PM
I have always thought this was going on - it is zero surprise at all, in fact it was probably unavoidable.
It doesn't take much work with a pencil and a back of an envelope to see that the peak load from fast chargers will rapidly exceed capacity of most local grids, so adding more chargers doesn't help, you need to add local peak load capacity with near-instant availability. There is only one way to do that fast without upgrading the entire grid - diesel gensets (or high capacity batter banks, but right now they aren't available in sufficient volume, hence the Musk's interest in "gigafactories").
The end effect is not much different to upgrading the whole grid anyway - with a grid supplied by unreliable renewables you need some reserve capacity, again with near-instant availability. In the UK that is "STOR" (short term operational reserve). Distributed generation capacity with instant guaranteed availability. Gigawatts of it. What actually is STOR physically... wait for it... (drumroll) - yep, diesel f***ing gensets, thousands of them, hidden around the country.
Putting the gensets near the superchargers actually makes a whole lot of sense, but it's upsetting to the windmill advocates who don't want to know that their twin goals of running the lights of windmills and having the lights stay on when the wind stops requires diesel backup, they prefer the dirty secrets hidden away.
In terms of local non-carbon emissions, the use of diesel gensets to charge electric cars is still a win - modern gensets are more efficient than car or truck engines and way cleaner (lot easier to build full scrubbing/cleaning into stationary kit). In terms of carbon emission it's probably a wash, shucks, should've thought it through before buying a tesla...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:19AM
It isn't as terrible as you think. Consumer cars with internal combustion engines in them are between 20-35% efficient, depending on the RPM required for the speed you are traveling. With the losses from the drivetrain and whatnot, you are looking at 15-22% of the power in the gas hitting the wheels. Diesel generators are between 50 and 60% (based on a quick search), due in big part because of the fact they stay in the most efficient power band and because they can tune for efficiency for power (similar to gasoline generators can Atkins cycle engines with tuned intakes, not Otto). Combined with the average 60% charge-to-wheels efficiency of electric cars, the generator + electric car is 30-36%. So you are looking at an improvement of 36-240%, (178% if you use the middle of both ranges) by using a diesel-charged electric over an ICE car. Sure it isn't as good as solar charging or whatever, but more than doubling your efficiency compared to the alternative isn't a rounding error either.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Monday December 09 2019, @02:46PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Monday December 09 2019, @02:56PM
I fail to see what giving yo Mama a lift the other week has to do with diesel superchargers, but I found the supercharger a lot more agreeable since you're asking. It didn't answer back and criticise my driving from the backseat either, come to that.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday December 09 2019, @03:58PM (1 child)
One flatbed truck charges a fleet of cars while screaming down the highway. After charging up they can fulfill their missions of rescuing people from the incoming storm (caused by climate change of course).
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday December 09 2019, @04:09PM
Clean environmentally friendly EVs should be used to help produce and deliver petroleum products to the diesel generators which charge EVs.
And we need to help get Clean Coal involved here somehow. And I don't just mean by putting it in Christmas stockings.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @04:20PM
I hook my Teslala up to an F350 Diesel which is equipped with twin 98mm turbos and an emissions delete switch. You should see the smoke coming out of those stacks when I charge that sucker up. The only downside is a carwash to remove the soot from my non-polluting Teslala.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Lester on Monday December 09 2019, @04:27PM
Electricity has never been a source or energy. There are no mines or fields of electricity. Electricity must be produced, by Solar Panel, by Wind, by dams, by diesel, by gas, by nuclear .... The same for hydrogen cells.
Electricity has some problems. It is not stored efficiently: batteries waste energy and worn out. And when you convert the energy from electrical to mechanical or from electrical to thermal, you waste energy in the conversion.
But electricity has an advantage. It is the Esperanto of energy. We know how to convert any energy from/to electricity.
Changing cars to using electricity is a wise movement, when we find new non-polluting way to produce energy, the cars will be ready. Nevertheless, the problem of renewable and non polluting source of energy is not solved. Electricity can be produced by solar cells etc, but now it is mostly produced by fossil fuels adn nuclear plants
(Score: 5, Informative) by PhilSalkie on Monday December 09 2019, @06:42PM
Two Model S here - P85D and P100DL, I've put about 70,000 miles on them so far, most of that distance road trips. Over 400 supercharge events at more than 70 locations east of the Mississippi, never saw a temporary Supercharger setup or a diesel generator supplying power - and never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a charging spot, and that only about twice. (There's an awesome website called "Teslafi" that logs all that driving and charging info for you.) House has 13KW of solar panels, and any electric power we buy is wind generated, so the day-to-day short term driving is all artisinal, locally sourced electrons. US electrical grid's around 27% coal, 35% NatGas, less than 1% diesel - and that mix is using less coal every year. Overall less coal here on the East coast, but I've seen analyses that suggest that even a battery EV charged from 100% coal generated power is still cleaner overall than a gasoline or diesel vehicle. Most people don't think of the large amount of energy expended in refining and transporting liquid fuels - it doesn't come out of the ground as gasoline, but natural gas requires very little refining (there's actually a separation process that splits off the more profitable fractions like butane and propane - but you literally could stick a pipe into a well and run a generator from it, no refining required.) Coal's no picnic to transport, but it's pretty much dig it up, move it to the power plant, and burn it, and the efficiency of a coal plant (in the mid 30% range) times the line losses getting the power to your actual car's battery beats a gasoline car's 20-30% times the losses incurred in fractional distillation (essentially vaporizing all the liquid and re-condensing it), energy involved in creating and adding octane modifiers and detergents, and the energy of transport required to get it to your gas station. Another way to think of those equivalences is by the market price you pay - if I pay $0.10 / KWh for electricity (US national average) to feed my 2.5 mile / KWh electric car, that's roughly equivalent to a 45 MPG hybrid paying $2.00 / gallon for gasoline - so (less the amount of governmental subsidy which may or may not be pouring down the throats of big oil or big solar) basic market rates say that electric propulsion's more efficient than gasoline or diesel, because I can't fuel a gasoline vehicle as cheaply as I can recharge a car. (And an electric vehicle requires no oil changes, has minimal brake wear, requires less general maintenance overall, and when the battery gets old enough that it's no longer usable for powering a vehicle, it'll still work well enough to be used as a house power battery.)
As for Megapack usage, the large current demand of supercharging a car has impacts on the local grid and on the cost of the electricity to the charge system vendor (Tesla, in my case, or Electrify America, or ChargePoint, etc.) Commonly, the more current you draw at one instant (the "Demand Load"), the higher the rate you pay for power _For The Entire Billing Period._ That is, if you never exceed an instantaneous draw of, for example, 50 KW, you may pay rate X for one KWH. If you ever exceed 50KW in a month, you may pay 1.5X - if you ever exceed 100KW, you may pay 2X. (These numbers are all negotiable items when large companies buy lots of power from suppliers - but there's definitely going to be a boost in price at some demand load.) You can get better rates if you let the power company communicate with your equipment and tell it when it can run - that's one way utilities can get away with not having enough generation to run every possible air conditioner in the city, they have certain large users they can contact and say "hey, back off on your usage for the next two hours" when there's a projected increase in power demand.
I was involved in installing some 3MW diesel gensets at an Air Force base - they had crazy peak demands due to large test equipment on-base (things like starting up a giant wind tunnel's fan motors.) The USD 10 Million+ that was spent on the generators, fuel tanks, pumps, etc. was expected to be recovered in six months' time due to the ability of those generators to be started _before_ the wind tunnels, then ramp up to soak up the peaks, then shut off. The savings would be entirely in the demand load differential - not having to pay N times the normal rate because the base drew an extra couple MW for 30 seconds when they started up the fans. The expectation was that the generators would run less than five hours per month.
So, if you put a large battery pack at a Supercharger station, you can program it to suck up power when cars are _not_ charging, then provide it when they're drawing the most load - my car might draw 110 KW for ten minutes, then slowly drop down to 50 KW, or as low as 25 KW if I'm eating lunch nearby and having the car fill up all the way. Having a local power buffer like a Megapack limits the demand load on the grid, which keeps Tesla's electric bill lower. It also smooths out the demand presented to the power generation stations, which might keep the utilities from needing to start up peaker plants to handle the sudden changes in load. Lots of utilities are now looking at exactly that on a grand scale (check out the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia) - they install huge battery packs to store excess power when it's available (or when it's cheap, or both) and release it when it's needed most. That "power rate arbitrage" can make huge amounts of money for the owner of the battery system - spot pricing for electricity is notoriously variable, primarily because large plants are slow to spool up, and small peaker plants are inefficient and expensive to own and run because they cost a lot but don't run very often.
Interestingly enough, lots of large buildings have been doing much the same thing with their air-conditioning loads for many years - they freeze large amounts of water at night in "Ice Build" rooms deep in the building, and use that ice as a heat sink during the day when power is more expensive and there's more load on the HVAC system. This is primarily because utilities have large amounts of excess generation ("Base Load") capacity at night, when few people are using power, and therefore power is artificially cheap. Once more solar power generation is installed, industries can and will take advantage of power price fluctuations during the day to store power - either in batteries, in ice build rooms, or by running energy intensive systems only when power is cheap. (Think of a large machine that shreds junk cars. You probably don't have to run that 24/7 - maybe only ten hours a week. If you choose to run it the ten hours that power's very inexpensive, it's a win for you, and helps balance the grid's usage.)
Most of the power rate infrastructure (at least in the US) isn't designed for the information age - it's older equipment, and there's not much ability yet for a consumer to, for instance, heat their water or charge their electric car when it's cheapest for them and best for the utility. The communications infrastructure is in place, but the power switching equipment and regulatory structure is not. I can't plug my water heater in to the internet and set up some sort of time/price based billing - yet - but that day's probably not too far away.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday December 09 2019, @08:02PM (2 children)
Well, considering you have to ship in fuel (that is shipped there by an ICE vehicle with the efficiency losses), that is then run in another IC Engine (more efficiency loss), to turn a generator to charge batteries (with efficiency loss), which then charges EV batteries (more efficiency loss). I would argue the most efficient thing would be to burn the damn Diesel straight in an ICE vehicle and be done with it.
Honestly, the above set up sounds mental. Charging is at best 75% efficient, doing it twice means you lose 25% of the energy in the first step, and then another 25% of the remainder in the step. Then factoring the use of an IC engine to actually charge the first battery bank negates any localised environmental benefit, while wasting more energy in the conversion process than if you just filled an ICE with Diesel and drove directly on that.
Not to mention all the toxic metals needed to make the batteries, which wear out with each cycle and must be eventually replaced & recycled (more energy required), makes me think the total energy efficiency of this cycle is probably lower, and the environmental cost higher, than an equivalent ICE vehicle.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:01AM (1 child)
On the other hand, a large engine for a generator may be more efficient and can have better pollution controls that won't even fit in a car.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday December 10 2019, @12:16PM
Yeah, but any potential efficiency in a larger engine is negated by the two charging steps. Also all Diesel engines pretty much have the same pollution controls nowadays, including requiring "adblue", along with similar efficiency. You only start to get efficiency "economies of scale" with much larger engines AFAIK.
The only potential benefit is that car engines are only as well maintained as the people who own the cars. That means most are barely maintained, and a few will actually rip out the pollution controls in order to improve efficiency/performance of the engine.
There isn't much you can do to an electric car to make it pollute more than it already does. Short of just dumping it at its EOL rather than it being properly recycled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @08:20PM (1 child)
Did anyone read the article? It said they used to use diesel. No where in the article does it say it currently uses diesel!!!??? More fake news by the right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @03:00AM
I read the article before I posted the story. Tesla has just started to use one of the mega battery car chargers. The article clearly says that the rest of their peak demand mobile chargers are currently diesel.
Not "WTF" at all.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:27AM
She'll start whining and insisting that you trade your Tesla in for a donkey.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @01:50PM
So, they used this to ease the transition, nothing really to see here.
It seems to me that most people will not be using super-chargers all that much anyway as they will mostly use in-house chargers.
The super-chargers were just there to make people not fear the range issue so much.
I think it is good to have both, but I think people think "e-gas station" when they think super-charger, but most people are just charging in their home because it is more time efficient, even if they have free use of the super-chargers.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Tuesday December 10 2019, @09:52PM
So Tesla is actually charging batteries, that are used to charge batteries, which are finally used to charge your car?
I am not up on the latest battery technology, but that sounds atrociously inefficient, and that is not even considering in all the pollution it took to manufacture all those extraneous batteries.
I do not get it. Tesla's aren't that expensive nor that popular. How can Tesla afford to just flush all that energy and money down the drain?
But then I guess power lines are inefficient as well. It is conceivable that charging a battery and driving it 50 miles might actually be more efficient than sending power over 50 miles of cable, but I doubt it.