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Comment by imchillyb | Hacker News Reader

Just a reminder:

Power companies in the US are primarily government regulated monopolies. These are the same monopolies that duped the public into replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs claiming they would save power. At the same time, though, these companies lobbied the regulatory bodies and stated that their projected profits were down, because consumption was 'lower than expected' and hiked our rates across the board.

There is competition in the gasoline space. There is none or next to none in the power space.

What do you think will happen to the costs of 'fueling' electric vehicles here in the US when 50% or more of our vehicles are electric?

Time to revisit those rates!

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> These are the same monopolies that duped the public into replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs claiming they would save power.

LED bulbs are more efficient, what is your point?

> There is competition in the gasoline space. There is none or next to none in the power space.

Really, how much of our oil comes from dictators that turn the tap down to manipulate the global oil price whenever it suits them? This is an insane statement.

In the US? Probably near zero because we're self-sufficient.

Exporting more than we import isn't the same as being self-sufficient, and regardless of the terms we use, has only occurred since 2019.

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...

Oil is still a global market and dictators turning off the tap will massively raise gas prices in the US. Currently gas prices in the US are rising because OPEC+ has reduced production quotas.

The statement is only insane when one doesn't understand the behind the scenes electric company monopolies in the USA.

While cost per kilowatt hour has decreased significantly over the last decade, consumer prices have /increased/ significantly.

This is because the electric grid in the US is semi-regulated monopolies.

The same is not true for Oil, Gas, or Natural Gas as there is competition in the marketplace. The competition is light, and there are few players, but few is always better than a single supplier.

Single suppliers /always and forever/ raise prices beyond what the market can sustain, because they can.

I can't speak for OP, but these days a lot of conversation about efficiency and green is considered "woke", so it can be categorically dismissed without even considering the truth of things.

The Trump administration wanted to disband the Energy Star program[0] (Energy Star is a certification that a device meets certain efficiency standards).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star

> There is competition in the gasoline space.

The US government heavily subsidizes gasoline (and every other fossil fuel), which is just as market-distorting as what you describe. The market price does not reflect the real cost of production.

>The US government heavily subsidizes gasoline (and every other fossil fuel), which is just as market-distorting as what you describe. The market price does not reflect the real cost of production.

Source? AFAIK the articles/studies that make that claim use a very generous definition of "subsidies", which include stuff like accelerated depreciation[1], and not taxing externalities associated with carbon emissions.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/01/02/oil-ga...

It's not gasoline directly, it's oil (and other fossil fuels) more broadly: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...

Your source has the exact issues that I mentioned in the previous comment, and fails to address them.

>Explicit subsidies accounted for only 8 percent of the total. The remaining 92 percent were implicit subsidies, which took the form of tax breaks or, to a much larger degree, health and environmental damages that were not priced into the cost of fossil fuels, according to the analysis.

Tax breaks are equivalent to subsidies at the scale that fossil companies operate at.

this is one of those things where you simply have to decide if your understanding of reality, let alone your moral calculus, includes some large % of the ~800B/yr 'defense' budget.

the thing we 'defend' are 'our interests' and top of those are secure shipping lanes, pipelines, and cooperative regimes for the smooth, stable supply (and therefore pricing) of the oil that fuels our emp^H^Hconomy.

Electric cars use 1/4th the energy of ICE cars (https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml).

Petroleum for transportation currently accounts for 27% of US energy usage (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/).

If 100% of cars switch to electric (not happening any time soon) - we only need 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity.

We'll be on pace to add that much just in solar in 3 years. It's not going to be a problem to handle electric vehicle adoption over 15 years.

20% more electricity generation for 100% EV adoption in the US is a figure I've seen quoted before.

We need to "electrify everything" and for that (including home heating and industry) I've seen figures around doubling our electricity needs (while lowering our energy needs overall since burning stuff is so inefficient).

Luckily, wind and solar are incredibly cheap sources of electricity and not burning fuel in inefficient cars (or home boilers) frees up a whole lot of fossil fuels for other tasks.

I'm not sure that those numbers are comparable - the energy used by ICE cars doesn't come from the grid. You need to compare directly the energy used by transport by the amount of grid usage that an electric car nation would have.

(Disclaimer, in full support of electric cars, just want accurate numbers)

If you have an electric water heater, and you replace that electric water heater with a heat pump water heater and you replace an ICE car with an EV, your electricity usage is likely to go down.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/06/a-heat-pump-water-heate...

That's right, the typical household uses more electricity to heat water than they would to charge an EV.

> If you have an electric water heater, and you replace that electric water heater with a heat pump water heater and you replace an ICE car with an EV, your electricity usage is likely to go down.

That line of thinking totally ignores the opportunity cost of being able to use the savings from the water heater elsewhere, or not generating the electricity in the first place. Consumption is consumption. You can't pretend it isn't by bundling it with something else.

>That's right, the typical household uses more electricity to heat water than they would to charge an EV.

That's a leap in logic. Specifically, it assumes that "the typical household" uses an electric water heater.

Let's run the numbers -

Americans used 135B gallons of gas in 2022. Going to ignore diesels for now. Average MPG of a car is 25. 135*25 = 3.3T miles. Teslas get 26 kWh per 100 miles, or about 1/4 kW per mile 3.3T miles / 4 = ~825B kWh = 825TWh or 2.815 quadrillion BTU

I sadly have to run and can't make heads nor tails out of the link posted for US energy usage - but at least we know what goes on one side of the equation now.

Total energy consumption in the US is 100.4q BTU currently.

Current electricity generation is 37.8q BTU.

It depends how much energy is lost in generating electricity.

Since >90% of NEW generation currently comes from solar & wind - the loss will be minimal compared to current methods (coal & natural gas with an average loss >50%).

I'm assuming that by the time electric vehicle adoption picks up close to ~0% of NEW generation will come from coal or natural gas.

If we would continue to generate ~60% of electric from fossil fuels - it's maybe a net negative trade to move them to electric. But in 15 years - the grid will be <30% fossil fuels, and in 30 it will be close to 0.

> Petroleum for transportation currently accounts for 27% of US energy usage

> 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity

There is no relation between amount of petroleum used and amount of electricity generated in the data provided by you. All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today. You did not provide any data about how much of total energy used is electricity . If electricity is 7% of total energy usage, then we need 100% extra to charge all the cars.

TLDR: your math is wrong.

> There is no relation between amount of petroleum used and amount of electricity generated in the data provided by you.

There is.

> All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today.

No.

We know how many BTU equivalent are used for electricity generation vs gasoline for transportation. And how much BTU equivalent is needed to power electric cars.

> TLDR: your math is wrong.

It probably is. Looks like transportation is 36% not 27% - that comes out to ~9% instead of ~7%.

The point still stands.

> We know how many BTU equivalent are used for electricity generation vs gasoline for transportation. And how much BTU equivalent is needed to power electric cars.

Show us the data.

> There is.

There is literally no relation.

"Cars use 27% of total energy in US. And 25% of 27% is equal to 7% of electricity generated." HOW??

I already did.

Unless you show us data on how much %age of total energy usage is electricity, there is no relation between the two!

According to some sources, electricity accounts for about 20% of total energy usage. So with your numbers, we would need extra 6.75% of total energy used. 6.75% of 20% is an extra 33.5% of electricity.

It's literally right here: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

100.4q BTU total US energy usage.

37.8q BTU electricity (~37% or ~18% depending on how you count loss).

27.5q BTU transportation (~27% OR ~36% depending on how you count loss).

You're assuming that ~60% of NEW electric generation will come from fossil fuels. We won't have a ~60% loss in electric generation from solar & wind - which is currently ~90% of NEW generation. In 5 years, coal & natural gas will likely drop to ~0% of NEW generation.

So you admit your original conclusion of "we only need 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity." is wrong?

If you take energy use used for transport (27.47), multiply it by 25% (because it's more efficient), you get 6.87. That's 18% of how much we generate in electricity today (37.75), not 7%.

Ok, 25% of 27.5q BTU = ~ 7q BTU

So we need extra 7q BTU of electricity, right? Which is about 18% of 37.8!

So, not 7, not 9, we would need at least 18% extra electricity.

TLDR: Your math was wrong!

The cost of charging my electric car with my solar panel? Hmm, I suspect it will be about the same price as now.

Not all of us are lucky enough to have an year round sunlight supply.

Correct, though at the same time, those with more sunlight tend to have higher electricity usage during the sunniest months.

So there's a big conspiracy theory to get rid of gas and replace it with electricity so "Big Electricity" can gouge people in Alaska?

The end game is pretty obvious: https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/electricity-b...

Seems to be a trend. The state of Maine is voting on a ballot initiative to take over the corporate ran power company and replacing it with state ran public utility. Naturally they included commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the charter, aka race and income based utility bills.

Every place I have paid bills advertises discounts for the poor, mixture of government and private.

The corruption of DEI does not benefit the little people, but the political consultants and PR departments.

That's mid-game. The end-game is that these policies result in the grid becoming uncompetitive with self-generation plus fossil-fueled backup. Everyone who is able defects, leaving everyone unable holding the bag on a stranded asset.

Whenever I've run the numbers, a global power grid is much cheaper than the batteries needed for seasonal variations; the wibble factor being, as usual, politics.

Batteries themselves are cheaper over their lifetimes than fossil fuels. The wibble factor for that being quite how long battery lifetime is. This is a Vimes Boots type of failure, as it means the rich can afford to spend less money than the poor.

If there's a fair-priced market for mid-life batteries, and/or good financing available for packs that you want to keep around for a decade and may keep around for two decades before replacing, then this may help with batteries, but even then a grid is cheaper if you can do it (keep the batteries for mobile storage needs, which is mostly transport but also disaster relief).

Global power grid is only going to happen if very large governments do it deliberately; this may well happen for the same reason China did the Belt and Road Initiative, though a suitable capacity global grid would by itself be about the same sort of scale (in both time and money) as the entire Belt and Road Initiative.

Grids are also basically a requirement for cities: while one can put PV on the side of a skyscraper, this won't be suitable for every single person in every single apartment.

Curious also that utilities are also choosing point-of-use batteries over infrastructure upgrades: https://archive.ph/OXLgE

I think you are overestimating the number of people who will fully go off grid. Doing that requires you to overbuild your generation and storage capabilities a fair bit which is expensive and wasteful. Grid tie is better in most cases.

>I think you are overestimating the number of people who will fully go off grid.

They are for sure... At the end of the day the state is not going to let the grid collapse as a matter of national security. Grid connections will be demanded for a certificate of occupancy, and anyone that refuses will learn about all the military equipment our police forces have been gifted.

It's not going to happen overnight. It'll be a slow corrosion. We're already starting to see the first tarnish. In my town, PG&E wanted to charge a new home (on an existing street with existing utilities) >$300k for an updated hookup (mandated to be underground), so the owner declined and went the self-generation route instead. An occupancy certificate (at least around here) requires functional utilities, but doesn't specify where they come from.

Folks who argue against the self-generation route tend to assume that solar and storage has to cover 100% of usage. That's unnecessary, and specifically why I called out fossil-fueled backup. For my own usage, a 14 kilowatt PV array, 20 KWh of battery storage, and a 2 kilowatt generator with remote start (controlled automatically) lets me fully disconnect forever.

I haven't yet, mostly because I have NEM 2.0 and the very-high fixed grid charge hasn't kicked in yet. Once it does, there's little reason for me to stay. My system paid itself off in <4 years of avoided costs, but I did it on the cheap by buying used hardware and doing the installation myself. When I set out on the build, I projected my payback time to be closer to 7 years. Rates went up faster than I expected and my usage also went up more than I expected once the electricity was free. I ended up getting an induction cooktop, a heat pump, and an electric car.

And I totally agree with you that this approach is wasteful from the perspective of global optimization of overall resource utilization. If this were Factorio and not the real world, the self-generation approach would be dumb. But in practice, the retail cost of electricity is rising fast while solar and battery costs have plummeted. That reduction in cost has really moved the needle on the microeconomics.

I'm curious where are you located - 20kwh means you are fairly dependent on sunlight, right?

94022

The large size of the array means that even an overcast day produces more than I usually need. The battery capacity only feels small when using the pool heat pump to warm up the hot tub, which drains one of the two 10 KWh batteries. The workaround is to preheat it during the day when there's excess solar and then only spend the energy to keep it warm.

I do plan to increase the battery array size eventually, but mostly so I have enough peak power to both cook and do laundry at the same time without needing to do so during the day to avoid pulling anything from the grid.

$128 per month fixed charge for having a grid tie and not using it is also expensive. This income-graduated fixed charge surely pushes the break even point towards going off grid.

End-game implies that this is an outcome that someone is deliberately aiming for? If so, who?

> There is none or next to none in the power space.

In states with deregulated markets, there's tons of competition.

Gasoline pricing is highly regulated.

Pricing arguments are a distraction from the idea that spewing garbage into the air just to buy groceries when there's an alternative is terrible.

>Gasoline pricing is highly regulated.

In what jurisdiction? In most developed countries they're anything but. Prices go up and down in response to crude oil prices and other factors. If that counts as "highly regulated", I don't know what you'd call prices that are set by government review boards.

Yes, they have to price greater than what they pay, but they have limited ability to raise prices in terms of demand.

This conversation is a bit ironic, considering the number of politicians that use gas prices as a talking point (and their followers who parrot those points)

> Yes, they have to price greater than what they pay, but they have limited ability to raise prices in terms of demand.

That's a very creative interpretation of "regulated" means.

So do you believe that government has little to no influence on gasoline prices?

I'm not sure makes you think that. I feel like you're trying to move the goalposts. My objection is with your characterization of gas prices as being "regulated", not that the government has zero influence over gas prices.

mostly I was just responding to the implication that gasoline is a product of the market: "Prices go up and down in response to crude oil prices and other factors."

Perhaps if we want to restrict the definition of regulated, then sure, I'll accept that gasoline isn't regulated, but it's hardly laissez faire pricing: the government frequently steps in to squash market pricing. There's a reason you don't see an 88-cent swing in gas prices as your drive across town (88 cents being the historic margin between wholesale and retail)

Note that during this exchange you've completely ignored the fact that many states are electricity deregulated. At this moment I can pick from dozens of providers with an array of pricing plans.

> mostly I was just responding to the implication that gasoline is a product of the market: "Prices go up and down in response to crude oil prices and other factors."

Are crude/gasoline prices not a product of the market? I guess you could argue that it's not the true market price because you could always compare it to the counterfactual price where there's no government involvement in oil production whatsoever, but the government is effectively hands-off when it comes to pricing. It might have policies to promote oil production/trade, but prices are set by interactions between market participants (ie. supply and demand) rather than some sort of government board.

>I'll accept that gasoline isn't regulated, but it's hardly laissez faire pricing: the government frequently steps in to squash market pricing. There's a reason you don't see an 88-cent swing in gas prices as your drive across town (88 cents being the historic margin between wholesale and retail)

Maybe that's because gas station have similar business models and expenses, which means nobody can charge a $0 markup on wholesale, and competition between stations means that nobody can charge too much above that?

>Note that during this exchange you've completely ignored the fact that many states are electricity deregulated. At this moment I can pick from dozens of providers with an array of pricing plans.

Actually if you read this exchange carefully I never claimed that electricity had regulated pricing, only the existence of government price boards (in general, not specific to electricity). :^)

If this is a concern you could just modify your house for solar power and then charge your car for free? There’s the initial cost of the solar installation of course, but at least you can sleep easy knowing the sun isn’t part of the deep state trying to raise rates on you.

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