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Comment by Guvante | Hacker News Reader

> I've yet to hear an explanation as to how well the grid will tolerate millions of cars being plugged in all the time

Really well actually, done correctly it will actually make power production cheaper per watt for everyone.

Since cars spend the vast majority of their time idle they can charge whenever. Whenever in this case being the middle of the night when the lack of workers causes power usage to bottom out.

The power companies would prefer a flat usage line and having cars that can intelligently start charging when ideal can totally help with that.

Additionally I would point out that while zero-emissions is a bit disingenuous electric cars are the only real path forward to zero-emissions. The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce.

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I run numbers and then years later only remember the rough result. But for a gasoline powered car 10-20% of the CO2 emissions are from manufacturing. So EV's help reduce CO2 emissions a lot. EV's emissions during manufacture are currently a bit higher than gasoline powered cars but not by much.

That said cars and the infrastructure needed to support them requires enormous amounts of resources, EV's don't change that much. But what what are you going to do?

On the other hand for California zero emission also means no NOx, SOX and PM2.5 tail pipe emissions in cities where most people live. Granted EV's produce some PM2.5 from tires and brakes. But that's a percentage of tail pipe emissions.

> The only other technology is hydrogen which also requires electricity to produce.

I am happy to be corrected, but I believe the only industrial scale production of hydrogen is splitting hydrocarbons. Using electrolysis is hugely inefficient.

If this is true, a lot of talk of hydrogen is submarine marketing for the fossil fuel industry.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are supposedly meant to be powered by electrolysis, which in turn would be driven by renewables.

Personally, I suspect the fossil fuel industry loves hydrogen fuel cells mainly because they are safely 10-20 years away.

> Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are supposedly meant to be powered by electrolysis

Yes, that's what people imagine is happening when talking hydrogen powdered cars. But I believe that electrolysis is so inefficient that it's not a realistic option for producing hydrogen on an industrial scale. This leaves us with breaking down hydrocarbons, hardly a "green" option.

A quick Google shows a chart saying $42/MWh which is on scale with electricity production in general.

Sounds too high for something like energy storage but I assume that is in the ballpark for reasonable car pricing from the phrasing of the report.

Also honestly we could use "good enough" ways of reducing emissions. Waiting for perfect would be a bad idea.

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