Electric Vehicles and Coal-Fired Power Plants
On my piece on EVs earlier today, my friend Tom Konrad of AltEnergyStocks.com writes:
Given the extra demand from a large number of EVs, how will the utilities supply the extra power? (This could be anything, not just renewables or fossil generation, but also possibly through demand side management (DSM) – better efficiency elsewhere freeing up power to charge cars.) Personally, my preference is to charge my car with DSM.
There is no doubt that energy efficiency and conservation are where the real low-hanging fruit lie in terms of the planet’s energy picture. Having said that, I think it could be argued that, regardless of how much power we’re consuming at any point now or in the future, anytime an incremental load on the grid is met with coal, this militates away from EVs as green transportation. This is the point that energy analyst Glenn Doty makes, and I think he’s exactly correct.
The issue is putting an end to coal, not only here in the U.S., but in the rest of the world, particularly China. This will take an effort of huge proportion that will require governments that have lukewarm relations with one another to work together in trust and harmony. All this, of course, is unprecedented. The driver is that it’s absolutely required if our civilization is to avoid the brunt of the climate change catastrophe that is so clearly headed its way.
As I said a couple of hours ago, just set up the EV charge-Point to the same circuit as the electric hoy water heater and use a relay to shut power off to the water heater while the EV is charging. The water has a storage of about one day so the driver’s household will never notice the missing reheat cycle of the water heater and there will be NO added demand for the EV charging as it is ofset by the off cycle of the hot water heater.
As I said a couple of hours ago, just set up the EV charge-Point to the same circuit as the electric hot water heater and use a relay to shut power off to the water heater while the EV is charging. The water has a storage capacity of about one day so the driver’s household will never notice the missing reheat cycle of the water heater and there will be NO added demand for the EV charging as it is ofset by the off cycle of the hot water heater.
This certainly keeps your power demand constant but you still need extra energy for charging the battery so this does not mitigate the need for extra power generation.
It is my understanding that because of: (1) the cost of new coal plants due in part to EPA enforcement of air pollution standards, (2) the lower cost (in comparison to coal) of new NG plants and (3) the low cost of NG, new coal plants are not being built in the US. As old coal plants reach end of life and are phased out, these are being replaced with NG plants, wind and solar. The issue is almost entirely what will China and India do. I don’t think that the US will have much influence on either; rather, their directions will be determined by domestic politics.
I would suggest that the “Electric Vehicles and Coal-Fired Power Plants” debate is a bit of a smoke screen (no pun intended) and is mainly another argument for those who are not keen on EVs in favour to ICEVs.
There may be a small amount of mileage in this argument in the short term but even that is debateable when you look at the overall well to wheel efficiencies and carbon emissions of oil + gasoline vs coal +EV routes for transport. However, in the long and possibly medium term, EVs can be used to mitigate the use of intermittent RE sources, such as PV, by the use of intelligent charging and also the possibility of providing distributed grid storage.
So looking at the bigger picture, EVs should be viewed as a means of increasing the speed at which we can move away from fossil fuelled power generation.
In thinking about this it occurs to me that perhaps the best use of electric vehicles is to have them charged at work during the day while PV is at it’s peak production. That way less charging if any at all would have to occur at night when you would have to run fossil fuel plants to provide the power.
Craig,
Obviously we agree here. The difficulty lies in the economics of it. It does seem plausible (though not likely) that we in America will end our use of coal by ~2035 – a full 2 decades before I would have thought possible 2 years ago. But this is due to the success of fracking in producing reliable low-cost natural gas.
Market movements – such as what we will experience this winter – will still result in price spikes for NG, and that will result in plenty of foot-dragging in terms of the public’s enthusiasm to switch more coal to natural gas… But it is possible that there we will see a coal-free electric grid in the U.S. within the next 25 years. That’s a miracle, and when the magnitude of that change is fully considered it nearly brings tears to my eyes.
Of course, if we were to add significant demand to the grid – especially within the demand profile that is a perfect fit for coal power plants – then it will take far longer… But still coal seems to be on its way out.
However, China doesn’t have a low cost natural gas alternative. They are building out nuclear power for questionable long-term gains, and they are of course building out more hydropower than the rest of the world combined… but their demand is still surging, and vastly out-pacing the build rate of any carbon-neutral or low carbon option.
For now our best bet is to try to encourage China to build only ultra-SCPC plants with good smokestack scrubbing whenever they build coal plants. I don’t see a power source that can be built out fast enough to fully supplant coal within the next decade, but at least we can try to force the plants to be less polluting until other options are developed and brought to bear (China will likely continue its increase in demand for the next 5 decades).