Green Steel

[Adam Peter]

5 hours ago, bojan said:

Almost scam. If most of your electricity comes from coal they are flat out scam in overall reduction of pollution. They can still serve as a local pollution reduction (in cities), but overall they will not be "green", and will on average be worse overall than a gasoline cars, since coal is much more "dirty" fuel than gasoline.

That is true if we only see CO2. Particles are a thing, too. More dirt generated outside the city is better. Many worry here about the thinking of the youth - small flying particles (IDK the English term) are responsible for dumbing down people, beyond respiratory effects.

I am sure filtering of those power plants yields better results than pre-Euro6 cars in their usual gas/brake pedal to the metal use.

If we develop something usable for CO2 (concrete?), then the power plants will be easier to harvest sources.

3 hours ago, sunday said:

There is also the question of new power generation needed to replace the fossil fuels used by the current fleet of ships, locomotives, trucks, cars, and motorcycles. Question that is remarkably absent of the future plans for the electrification of road transport.

Paranoid minds suppose the ruling classes want a future with unwashed masses deprived of private transport.

The solution to the road transport is simple: no trucks between cities with train access. Of course, that is impossible, that would force planning onto customers, and the logistics profession is too diluted to do it anyway.

I think private transport is not endangered, with photocells one can be really independent. For longer range? We are hybrid vehicles, too, so it must be a good solution. Forget diesel, re-discover CNG/LNG.

Edited August 29, 2021 by Adam Peter
CNG

[sunday]

1 hour ago, Adam Peter said:

The solution to ... is simple

Those kind of simple simplistic solutions tend to be more wrong than right, and not only because they usually come from ignorance of the subject matter. Rail transport could be cheap, but it is not flexible.

It is good for heavy industry, and bulk commodities, but slow and expensive for light industry/retail applications.

A solar roof panel is not enough to recharge an electric vehicle. Especially not an electric vehicle that happens to be used during the daytime. One needs more storage, even, on top of the used in the vehicle.

[Adam Peter]

1 hour ago, sunday said:

Those kind of simple simplistic solutions tend to be more wrong than right, and not only because they usually come from ignorance of the subject matter. Rail transport could be cheap, but it is not flexible.

It is good for heavy industry, and bulk commodities, but slow and expensive for light industry/retail applications.

There is a price everybody paid till now, time to let it paid by those who partake of it. I don't see the difference between railways and mail/web orders of these days. Now I order something, the truck transports it to a middle city next day, and on the second day a van transports it to my house. Why not transport it to my city by train, then by van?

1 hour ago, sunday said:

A solar roof panel is not enough to recharge an electric vehicle. Especially not an electric vehicle that happens to be used during the daytime. One needs more storage, even, on top of the used in the vehicle.

That's true, that's why we need electricity sharing (currently established), and standard replaceable batteries. Then hydrogen cars.

Also to consider nuclear energy again. There will be more fleeings from rain floods than from Chernobyls in the near future.

[sunday]

17 minutes ago, Adam Peter said:

There is a price everybody paid till now, time to let it paid by those who partake of it. I don't see the difference between railways and mail/web orders of these days. Now I order something, the truck transports it to a middle city next day, and on the second day a van transports it to my house. Why not transport it to my city by train, then by van?

That's true, that's why we need electricity sharing (currently established), and standard replaceable batteries. Then hydrogen cars.

Also to consider nuclear energy again. There will be more fleeings from rain floods than from Chernobyls in the near future.

Logistics is for pros. If there was a cheaper option, Amazon would have discovered it time ago.

Whatever band aids you may think there are available, there will be a need of more bulk generation, big generation: several GW-size, reliable, controllable plants. But you may guess who are the most vocal opponents of those plants: environmentalists.

And please stop with the faith-based arguments about more flooding - those have no base in reality.

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by sunday

[sunday]

To put some numbers, in 2019 the amount of gasoline consumed in Spain was around 0.5 million metric tons per month. Assuming a combined energy density of about 45MJ/kg for gasoline, a thermodynamic efficiency of 0.2 in the internal combustion engines, and a 75% efficiency from power station to the wheels of electric vehicles, the amount of electrical energy needed to replace all the gasoline used in Spain in the year 2019 amount to 20,000GWh, or 20TWh

In order to put that figure in context, Almaraz nuclear power station, perhaps the top performer in Spain, generated that same year 16,326GWh in its two, 1,000MWe, reactors.

Consumption of diesel oil was 4 times the consumption of gasoline. Some of that oil could have gone into heating, railways, or industrial processes, but assuming half went into transport, there will be another 4-5, 1,000MWe nuke reactors needed.

Then, there is the need to reinforce the electrical transport network, and the low voltage distribution network. Those are not trivial endeavors.

Edited to add: Feel free to check the figures.

Edited August 29, 2021 by sunday

[DB]

I suspect you're low-balling the efficiency of modern gasoline engines, but only by a relatively small amount over their typical duty cycle. Diesel engines are higher, with some claims of above 40% in truck engines. State of the art gasoline engines with a hybrid can exceed 50% in some circumstances (F1 engines are claimed to reach these numbers, but that's a very extreme example, with both motor-generator and kinetic energy recovery, with only the former seen in normal road use).

As a comparison of the nuclear option against a traditional generation method, Siemens is claiming 64% efficiency for their high-end combined cycle turbines (natural gas for electricity generation, with steam generation from the exhaust heat).

https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/offerings/power-generation/gas-turbines/sgt5-9000hl.html

Obviously, you'd need to add in the distribution network losses as per the nuclear option.

There is a ridiculous amount of controversy over the various attempts to work out end-to end efficiencies for the various systems, simply because it's an ideologically charged area of discussion. Most irritating to me is when people use electricity generation mix estimates from 20 years ago to downplay the role electricity has in this area.

Oh, and there's still much nonsense in the UK about the inefficiency of US cars based on mpg figures, when so many people don't know that US "g"s are smaller.

[sunday]

18 minutes ago, DB said:

I suspect you're low-balling the efficiency of modern gasoline engines, but only by a relatively small amount over their typical duty cycle. Diesel engines are higher, with some claims of above 40% in truck engines. State of the art gasoline engines with a hybrid can exceed 50% in some circumstances (F1 engines are claimed to reach these numbers, but that's a very extreme example, with both motor-generator and kinetic energy recovery, with only the former seen in normal road use).

As a comparison of the nuclear option against a traditional generation method, Siemens is claiming 64% efficiency for their high-end combined cycle turbines (natural gas for electricity generation, with steam generation from the exhaust heat).

https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/offerings/power-generation/gas-turbines/sgt5-9000hl.html

Obviously, you'd need to add in the distribution network losses as per the nuclear option.

There is a ridiculous amount of controversy over the various attempts to work out end-to end efficiencies for the various systems, simply because it's an ideologically charged area of discussion. Most irritating to me is when people use electricity generation mix estimates from 20 years ago to downplay the role electricity has in this area.

Oh, and there's still much nonsense in the UK about the inefficiency of US cars based on mpg figures, when so many people don't know that US "g"s are smaller.

Those are fair questions:

On thermal efficiency of gasoline engines, 20% was a good maximum efficiency about thirty years ago, yes, and modern motors are much more efficient. However, there is the duty cycle, as one engine running in a traffic jam sees its average efficiency decreased. But using a low efficiency also helps to not obtain ludicrous amount of equivalent electricity, as replacing low efficiency engines require less electrical energy.

On electric network efficiency, from memory, efficiency of big power transformers is >99%, HV transport losses are <5%, I WAG'ed battery charging plus LV losses plus EV efficiency, and guessed a 75% overall. Could be as low as 60%, or as high as 80%. Values for the nuclear energy generated are real GWh generated by the Almaraz nuke power station during 2019, and reflect the energy generated by the most available source of energy.

But the point here was to obtain an orders of magnitude estimate. It is not the same if the expected electrical load on a national power system due to EVs is about 1% or if the figure is about 15%. The back-of-the-envelope calculation is close to the last figure, and shows there is need of a substantial investment in building new generation facilities, as most of the new load on the national system would be base load. Nuclear/big coal would require the less amount of new installed generation, hydro would be little feasible, and wind and solar would require huge new facilities, considering the historical capacity utilization rates.

Edited August 31, 2021 by sunday

[DB]

Agree with all of those points - if it wasn't clear, my post was quibbling a little about relatively small differences which shouldn't affect the overall conclusions.

There is another side to this, however - what is the basis for the expected consumption of electrical energy by the average household for vehicle use? I wonder if people are looking at the expected daily use (which may be the kWh equivalent of < 50km/ day), or are they assuming that their home chargers will need to refill a 450km+ battery every night?

Planning requires capacity to support the mean, but local infrastructure probably needs to support the maximum rate, at least in terms of the ability to deliver 200 amps to an individual household (but not all of them simultaneously!)

[sunday]

You may quibble at your hearts content, DB - I think it is difficult to catch you in a mistake when discussing engineering matters.
 

9 minutes ago, DB said:

Agree with all of those points - if it wasn't clear, my post was quibbling a little about relatively small differences which shouldn't affect the overall conclusions.

There is another side to this, however - what is the basis for the expected consumption of electrical energy by the average household for vehicle use? I wonder if people are looking at the expected daily use (which may be the kWh equivalent of < 50km/ day), or are they assuming that their home chargers will need to refill a 450km+ battery every night?

Planning requires capacity to support the mean, but local infrastructure probably needs to support the maximum rate, at least in terms of the ability to deliver 200 amps to an individual household (but not all of them simultaneously!)

I simply looked at the figures for gasoline consumption in Spain, as almost all the stuff goes into private cars. Of course, the diesel ones still need to be considered.

On the local infrastructure matter, the problem is thorny. If most people plugs their car to charge it once arriving at home, then the load peak would be huge, making the electrical system less reliable, as if it not was enough with unpredictable generation by renewables. Of course, there will be need of rewiring the last mile to residences. That would be really, really expensive.

Another option I just think now would be to build an independent MV distribution network, in the American style with MV to the house, and a small "pig" transformer to step-down the voltage, perhaps even with centralized control of the individual pigs to smooth the peak loads. It could be cheaper to have a parallel high power network for recharging EVs than modifying the current LV distribution network. 

[DB]

Oh boy, this turned out to be long.

tl;dr - agree with Sunday again and propose possible strategies for time-shifting the post rush hour peak, use of vehicle as a very local load balancer and a possible way to spread the load.

 

I'd forgotten that you estimated the energy needs based on an estimate of the total energy being replaced - that seems robust to me and more realistic than the nightmare scenario of a full "tank" every night that is used by people who think that the infrastructure cannot be in place to support universal EV use.

Assuming that the "last mile" issue is resolved (and new builds with an expectation of home charging - any property with a garage or off-road parking - should be provided with something like 200 amps right now, make it part of the building regulations), then we have to consider the aggregate load problem as you state.

With "smart" meters and communications between vehicles and the grid, perhaps installed alongside the proposed use of "spare" capacity in EVs to provide grid load balancing could go a long way to resolving this.

In fact, given that Tesla produces a "Powerwall", they could probably implement the same technology into their cars to allow them to serve as a Powerwall when connected. This may seem counter-intuitive, but offloading your own house's grid consumption by using a connected EV would reduce the very problem we're discussing, reducing overall grid draw for a neighbourhood and time shifting the recharge of the vehicle until later in the night when other applications are less likely to be running.

Actually, using your car as a Powerwall might be a more palatable option to people than "reversing your meter" and helping to feed the entire grid using your car. I think it could be implemented without needing to be managed by the supplier, too.

OK, so that time-shifts the problem away from the peak times into perhaps the middle of the night, but maybe that can be managed without a grid-wide coordinated solution too - if vehicles know their state of charge and limit their current draw to allow charging to occur over the expected amount of time that they're likely to remain plugged in, or maybe a fixed time like 5am (user selectable) then they would start drawing from the grid again at times more widely distributed than the relatively narrow range imposed by rush hour commuting.

[sunday]

I made a mistake. When giving a figure for the new generation needed I implicitly assumed the recharging was to be distributed along all day, not concentrated in the night hours. So that figure of 2, 1,000MWe nuke plants could easily go up to 3-6 plants. That is really a very major investment, especially factoring in the Diesel vehicles, which in Spain amount to a bit more than a half of all internal combustion vehicles, but with lots of trucks, vans, and the like, their energy consumption would be substantially greater, perhaps 2 to 3 times more.

So 6 x 1,000MWe plants could be understood as a conservative minimum estimate of the new generation to build in order to power a substitution of all IC vehicles for EV ones.

Also, it looks like the residential chargers for EV for sale in Spain come in 4 power ranges: <3.7kW, 7.4kW, 11kW, 22kW. The later would draw a bit more than 100A from the net, and both the 11kW and the 22kW ones -that as of today could only be used by premium EV like some Teslas, Audis, Porsches, etc.- need 3-phase power. 

[DB]

Well, the highest power domestic circuits in the UK would likely be "power shower", with a consumption up to 12.5kW and 50 amp protection. This is likely to be the only option going forward for instant shower heating as gas is being phased out for new builds through regulation. (another stressor on the grid!)

[sunday]

This looks like neo-Malthusians in charge, trying to fulfill doom prophecies. Same as with the flooding of the Somerset Levels some years ago.