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Comment by RexRollman | Hacker News Reader

Something I've always wondered, and I bet someone else here has thought about it, is what happens if electric vehicles do become popular?

It seems to me that we would have a huge surge in electrical demand and that would make electricity more expensive. Could the electrical infrastructure even keep up? And wouldn't we just end up shifting where waste comes from (from Cars to power plants). And battery recycling would certainly become a very important thing.

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If the cars are mostly charged overnight, it won't be a big deal. The biggest strain on the power grid and generation capacity comes in the late afternoon, when people's air conditioners are cranking at full blast. That's when the most expensive and dirtiest energy is generated (coal energy is great at ramping up to meet peaks in demand, and power companies will obviously keep their most expensive generators in reserve for peak loads). Adding more consumption at night is actually a great thing, because it lets power companies get more use out of the big capital expenditure on their power plants. Obviously this depends on people actually charging at night, but that can be handled through financial incentives.

And, of course, centralizing the generation of emissions can be a good thing in that you just need to upgrade a few generators to improve efficiency/reduce emissions vs upgrading millions of cars.

I don't think that's really true. I though coal is quite slow at ramp-up. Gas (sorry, UK English, I mean gaseous hydrocarbons like propane) is much more responsive. Coal is cheap (especially if you already have the infrastructure, built when labor was cheaper), that's its advantage.

Anyway, even coal is more efficient than car engines. IIRC, coal is something like 60% efficient (and it really can't get better, due to the laws of physics), cars are more like 30% efficient. OK, coal power still needs to be distributed and then there's some loss in the electric engine, but it's minimal, and petrol also needs distribution. Thus, coal creates less carbon emissions than petrol.

Coal in a modern generating plant is burned quite efficiently. It's pulverized into a powder, then blown into the combustion chamber with a lot of high pressure air. The burning coal is literally a fireball under the boiler.

The old image of heavy black smoke pouring out of the stacks is not the way it is anymore.

http://www.canadiancleanpowercoalition.com/index.php/downloa...

> And wouldn't we just end up shifting where waste comes from (from Cars to power plants)

That's something you want to do. Dealing with a big stationary waste source (often that you can locate at a place of your choosing) is a lot easier than dealing with millions of small, mobile waste sources.

The hope is, on the utility side, that the introduction of "smart grid" and "smart metering" technology will help to introduce staggered scheduling of smart appliances and devices such that they do not add significantly to peak times.

For example, if your car has implemented the ZigBee Smart Energy Profile it will connect to your smart meter (HAN network) and will know to start charging only over night (or only if it absolutely has to) when the demand for electricity is far less and most likely cheaper - after the utility implements more levels of peak pricing. We're probably a decade away from such things.

My local utility already offers a tariff that includes three price levels, depending on the time of day.

One thing to bear in mind is that energy production is MUCH more efficient when done at scale (i.e. power plant) than having lots of little power plants (i.e. internal combustion engines).

There's still the issue of transporting the energy, but the waste/consumption to output ratio definitely favors generating power at large scale.

[edit: Another thought. I'm not sure about this and can't find a quick reference, but I would guess that scrubbing the emissions at a coal plant can be done more effectively than at the per-internal combustion engine level.]

> …scrubbing the emissions at a coal plant can be done more effectively than at the per-internal combustion engine level.

This is true, especially because you can put a fence around a coal plant, while you can't always put a fence around your catalytic converter to keep meth-heads from stealing it for the platinum[1].

1: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=catalytic+converter+meth-head

> what happens if electric vehicles do become popular?

That is a really strange question to ask. I think more appropriate question would be "what does it take for electric vehicles to become popular".

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