Since this is my first diary let me introduce myself, I’m a Canadian Mechanical Engineer looking to get back to work and looking to publish stuff and so I’m writing a series of posts about the Green New Deal. I also write Science Fiction and have a novel looking for beta readers and if you want to do that put your email in a comment.
I confess I’m an MKS man (Meters Kilograms Seconds) and will use those units exclusively, and the ones derived from them exclusively. I find they’re less confusing than USC, even if you’re not familiar with them.
I read the Green New Deal when it came out and what jumped up and bit my nose was not what it said but what it left out. The Techie Green Deal is about putting it what was left out.
Omitted was a very great deal on the scope of the work they are proposing to do. I’ve also done some North American permitting (mostly in Canada) and getting the permits for that much work in ten years is sounding impossible under permitting regimes laxer than under Donald Trump. Given the Very Extensive Consultative process the Green Deal have called for there is no hope for a 2035 all electric car fleet that doesn’t bring down the grid.
From where I stand the key issue in the Green New Deal is reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Piety much everything else is peripheral or irrelevant if that isn’t done, and any plan that doesn’t focus intently on that will be nattered away.
That is the lynch pin that everything connects to. And almost invariably reducing those emissions entails using electricity to do what ever needs doing is. So the first question that has to be asked is how much electricity will be needed?
This diary looks at how big a supply of renewable electricity will be needed, and when – in a 24 hour day it will be needed. The later is important because electricity is purchased in 1/60 second lots in North America (It’s different elsewhere). The Next Diary looks at how quickly different types of generation can come onto the grid, which has implications for what the grid (and I will assume a Grid Management company that acts as an honest broker, like Manitoba Hydro, even if they keep getting charged with dumping electricity, they keep getting acquitted! And make a profit.)
Before we proceed further I will to note that there are three electrical grids in North America. North America means Canada and the United States.
They are East Grid and the West Grid that’s in Mountain Time. And Rather spectacularly this year, Texas has its own grid, but would otherwise connect to the western grid. I know Quebec sells a LOT of power @ 750 Kilovolts to New York but floats its own synchronization. The map at the top of this diary shows all of this. And there’s a separate diary planned that deals with both making it one grid, and making many smaller sub-grids, and buffering them with HVDC links.
The place to start to answer this question is how much electrical generation is there in North America, and how it is generated. The EIA has the US data
Table 1:
ENERGY SOURCE
|
TYPE
|
RELATIVE INSTALLED CAPACITY
|
TOTAL INSTALLED CAPACITY MW*
|
DO WE
KEEP IT?
|
TO BE
REPLACED
MW
|
NATURAL GAS
|
ALL TYPES
|
9.97%
|
492,920
|
NO
|
492,920
|
COAL
|
BOILER
|
7.22%
|
248,986
|
NO
|
248,986
|
NUCLEAR
|
ALL TYPES
|
14.90%
|
113,238
|
HALF US**
|
50,286
|
RENEWABLES
|
HYDRO (1)
|
59.12%
|
175,650
|
ALL
|
|
|
NON HYDRO
|
7.15%
|
182,897
|
ALL
|
|
PETROLEUM
|
|
1.62%
|
34,327
|
1/3***
|
22,082
|
OTHER
|
|
0.01%
|
5,587
|
ALL
|
|
|
TOTAL
|
|
1,253,605
|
64.95%
|
814,274
|
* MEGAWATT = 1,000,000 WATTS
** I’ve taken half as needing replacement in this diary. The details of this will be worked out in it’s own diary later in the series.
*** Many Canadian communities are on diesel electric power that is WAY, WAY expensive and nasty. Getting rid of them will be a serious challenge.
Table 1 summarizes the installed capacity for electrical generation, and how much of it needs to be shut down because of carbon emission or other issues. I’ve allowed half the US nuclear fleet as to be decommissioned soon, but presume the Canadian reactors have 70 years left in them due to their radically different design.
(1) Of note the Canadian Hydros dominates the class because 60% of all power in Canada is Hydro.
The Next Diary deals with how well each of them meets the grid managers needs for power and demand.
The next issue in seeing how many new power plants we need is how much power goes to driving Cars and Trucks?
In this I’m making lots of assumptions. So lets start with some facts:
US Oil Consumption: 20.47 million BBL/day = 3,254,890 Meters cube in 2019
Canadian Oil Consumption: 2.49 million BBL/day = 395,341 Meters cube in 2016
Combined Oil Consumption: 22.96 million BBL/day = 3,650,231 Meters cube.
Producing Gasoline 20 USG /BBL à 1,738,205 M3/day @ 34.2 MJ/l 59,447 TJ/D
Diesel Oil 12 USG / BBL à 1,042,923 M3/day @ 38.6 MJ/L = 40,257 TJ/D
Total ................................................................................... 99,703 TJ/D
99,703,450,221 Mega-joules per day à 1,154 Gigawatts if consumed uniformly.
And now the assumptions start:
I will assume that a car is about 20% efficient and a Diesel Truck about 25%, and that’s just on their engine type, and not on how they’re driven.
The US government tells me that EV’s are between 60% (at 65/35 City/Highway) and 77% which I’ll take for Trucks. Note that the heating system in an EV is a heat pump that acts like an air conditioner all the time while in a gasoline / diesel car it acts like more radiator and so does not reduce range.
So charging batteries to give the same service (So multiply the device mega joules by .2 or .25, and divide by .6 and .75) my spread sheet says a total of 33,234,483,407 mega joules and that’s 385 Giga Watts if demand is uniform through the day.
The extant 1256 Gigawatts of installed power wants to run at 85% capacity so delivers 1065.655 Gigawatts, and will require at minimum 454 Gigawatts of additional power. Which is way less than when I ran this the first time (I was up at 2 Terawatts)
And now for the misery. There is an untenable assumption in the above calculation.
That is that the Electric Vehicles mostly charge uniformly through out the day. That isn’t right. And worse they DON’T charge during the day time when there’s lots of solar power available.
Most cars are in urban service, and mostly driving to and from the work place. And yes much of the office work is moving home because of the pandemic. But that’s just 20% of folks. Much work is done using machines that don’t and won’t move, or it’s construction and so move rather too much.
So most folks will end up driving to the plant and making something. They’ll do that in blocks and for the nonce I will assume that the plant does not supply power to allow the car to charge during the shift, and that a disproportionate percentage of shifts are day shift.
The result is that a nasty large percentage of that charging will be between 21:00 and 06:45, and hopefully (from the owner’s POV) on what I’m calling Class B Power.
Class B Power happens when there is a large electric load and an agreeable electric utility (which doesn’t happen in Texas) a second power service and meter is installed in the house. That electric load is coupled up and the utility can turn it on and off at will.
So when they get into a Class B situation, that’s where there’s not enough users to keep the power plants they have running at 85% load, they send out a signal to the B Meters. Then the Class B power meters close their switches and the Class B services, like battery charging or air conditioning / heating, turn on. This was/is common in the UK where eclectic heating was/is common, and unaffordable on Class A power, but with Class B power they heated the big water tank to 90º C at a fraction of the price and used that to heat the house using a hydraulic system when it was Class A power time. This allowed the power company to get better use out of their generators at night.
So I’m going to guess that 65% of all car trickle charging is at night. And 35% is concentrated between 6:00 and 9:00 and 16:00 and 18:00 about evenly. What that amounts to 35% of total daily demand from automobiles happening at 17:45 – 18:00 PM local time. This yields 7.7 GW of demand, and 9 GW of additional installed capacity.
My Brother was a truck driver, and he commented that his Monday almost always started at 16:00, and he’d pick up his load, at a plant or warehouse, and drive for several days then stop, park his truck at a company yard, and spend 24 – 36 hours in a hotel sleeping the drive off. Rinse and repeat. You can be sure that the truck will charge on Class B power when the drivers are not on a run, and that it will charge on Class A Power when they’re driving from one place to another.
Now on the road both cars and trucks will use high speed charging on Class A Power, at Class A Power Prices. Hotel nights are killer expensive. I will assume that is in Local Daytime, though dead of night for both also happens, some runs are dam long. So I’ll assume 75% of all long haul truck charging is at peak demand. So that’s 75% of the energy per day is still consumed by trucks during the 17:45 – 18:00 period when 35% of all energy that cars consume per day is drawn from the grid. That’s 116 GW of additional demand necessitating 135 GW of additional Generation Capacity.
Class A power is available at all times, and you pay for the privilege (This will be discussed in detail in I think the diary after next: The United Grid’s Problems & What it Pays / Charges.). Typically it is charged at the rate commensurate with the grid being at 85% - 95% Capacity. Class B power is cheaper, because the grid wants more users, because demand is below about 80% of capacity. And remember always electricity is sold in lots that last 1/60th of a second.
So the total amount of NEW renewable power plant to be built in north America (mostly in the US) is:
To replace Extant carbon emitting power and half Old US Nukes: ............. 814 GW
To Allow for use of EV’s Normal................................................................. 452 GW
To allow for EV Induced Peaking Loads @ 17:45 – 18:00 ......................... 146 GW
Total New Power Plants (Mostly in US)....................................................... 1,413 GW
Now if you think my estimates of peaking load on cars are off, tell me what to use. If the EV efficiencies are off again suggest a better number.
I haven’t allowed for rectifier inefficiencies so I’m off by that much but that’s 5% at most and given the quality of the back of this envelope it is noise.
I haven’t begun to consider what’s happening when other loads, like water chilling for A/C service in the southern States that might occur on B power that’ll shorten or eliminate it. Nor the use of solar for A/C with overnight storage of cold (Heating don’t work and that’s part of the diary on Home Solar).
References:
A note on references. I wrote Das Nerdal and just kept the address. Then the oil shock of 2015 hit and enough of my material disappeared I stopped doing that. I have PDFs of all of them.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv-ev.shtml
(https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20about%2060%25%20of,was%20from%20renewable%20energy%20sources.) And I hithttps://www.nrcan.gc.ca/science-data/data-analysis/energy-data-analysis/energy-facts/electricity-facts/20068
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Canada for the Canadian Data Grid interconnection necessitates this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282716/oil-consumption-in-the-us-per-day/#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20the%20United%20States,million%20barrels%20of%20oil%20daily.
https://www.worldometers.info/oil/canada-oil/#:~:text=Canada%20consumes%202%2C486%2C301%20barrels%20per,of%2097%2C103%2C871%20barrels%20per%20day.
This is my first diary, and I’m only hoping it prints as I set it up. Please forgive the formating I didn’t know what I was doing.