cross country trip on an electric bike ended by cager

[Drjones]

You can't use current electricity rates as any indication of future savings.  13 cent power today may end up being 20 cent power tomorrow if a lot of people start using electric vehicles and that cost affects everything, so you're just redistributing fuel cost across everything else you purchase.  There is no magic bullet to solve future energy needs.

[il d00d]

Sooo... $.50 for a recharge?    That's still about a 1/10th of what I pay to go 45 miles in my small truck.

Let's say we go to mostly electric vehicles.  The cost of fuel would have to increase more rapidly than the efficiencies gained by going to electric for fuel costs to impact consumer goods.  I think you are assuming we are either not paying for fuel costs now, or that once we go electric, the costs will skyrocket - in the latter case, I don't see much evidence to support that.

From what I understand the electric grid scales very well with demand.   Adding a bunch of electric cars doing overnight charges would mean the power suppliers would just keep producing at night -instead of shutting down the power plants that are more expensive (to them) to run- to meet the need.  What this would do to cost remains to be seen, but chances are cost would start to approach daytime rates, depending on how many cars are plugged in.

Bottom line:  it is super cheap to run this thing.  And while it is true that it does not run on nothing, and it does have a carbon footprint, I don't see much standing in the way of an electric vehicle future.

[LowThudd]

From what I understand the electric grid scales very well with demand.   Adding a bunch of electric cars doing overnight charges would mean the power suppliers would just keep producing at night -instead of shutting down the power plants that are more expensive (to them) to run- to meet the need.  What this would do to cost remains to be seen, but chances are cost would start to approach daytime rates, depending on how many cars are plugged in.

Bingo. And in fact power plants are more efficient when they run continuously rather than shutting down and starting back up.

[Drjones]

Let's put some numbers on this shall we.

From Brammo's site it says a full recharge is 3.1 kWH and around 3 hours which gives us a total of 1.03kW usage or 0.001MW.

Let's say the average person would normally travel 7000 miles in a year (brammo uses 10k for thier cost savings analysis) and 80% of those miles would be within a round trip range of an Enertia, so that give us 5600miles traveled and with the 45 mile range one would need to recharge around 124 times a year.

So with 124 recharges a year and 0.001MW used during that recharge ONE person would add 0.129MW of demand to the grid in a year.

Now there're around 127 million commuters in the USA, so let's say just 1% run out to buy Enertia's which would give us 1.27 million people going green.

If you're following those 1.27 million people would add demand of 163 GigaW to the grid.

From EIA's numbers the estimated total yearly power generation capactiy in the USA is 2026.9 GW, so just 1% of the commuting population switching to an electric motorcycle would add an 8% demand on the electric grid.

Again from EIA the current plans are for adding around 20MW of capacity per year or 1/10th of 1% of current capacity

um yeah, not sustainable.

[caboteria]

Let's put some numbers on this shall we.

I get different results than you do.  Looking at energy first, then power:

According to http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/epa/epa.html we generated 4,157 billion kilowatthours (kWh) of energy in 2007, but only 60.2% of that was electric utility plants i.e. 2502 billion kWh.  Using your assumptions, 124 recharges per year at 3.1kWh is 384.4kWh of energy per person (per year) times 1.27M people is about 0.488 billion kWh or a very, very tiny fraction of our annual generation, roughly 0.02%.

Looking at it from a power perspective, "Total net summer capacity in the United States as of December 31, 2007 was 995 gigawatts".  Assuming all 1.27M Brammisti from coast to coast plug in their bikes at the same time and assuming each one draws about a kilowatt we're looking at about 1.27GW which is enough to get you back to the future but still only a little more than 1% of the grid's power capacity.

Considering il d00d's point that a lot of the recharging would happen at night when demand is typically low it looks to me as if our grid has plenty of capacity.  I'm not sure what you mean by "sustainable" since most of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, but at least our infrastructure could handle the additional load.

[junior varsity]

...we're looking at about 1.27GW which is enough to get you back to the future ...

haha

Considering il d00d's point that a lot of the recharging would happen at night when demand is typically low it looks to me as if our grid has plenty of capacity.  I'm not sure what you mean by "sustainable" since most of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, but at least our infrastructure could handle the additional load.

I remember studying a lot about the rates changing based on night use and how the plants (boilers) were ramped up and down according to load back in undergrad power-gen classes. Quite interesting in application here, however, its a pipe dream to think people will only charge their brammo and the like at night, or that ahem, some of us, will use considerably more electricity and have to charge more often because we are quite hamfisted and fun loving.

[il d00d]

My math worked out a little different too That's millions and not thousands of gigawatt hours

From the EIA website:


4,157 billion KWh, or 4.1 Million gigawatts.

Here is a pretty good paper which outlines this scenario, and includes the break-even numbers for buying a plug-in electric hybrid given different gas and electric prices.
http://energytech.pnl.gov/publications/pdf/PHEV_Economic_Analysis_Part2_Final.pdf

[mstevens]

we're looking at about 1.27GW which is enough to get you back to the future

Nope. You're talking about gigawatts. Time travel requires jiggawatts.

[duc996]

You hit somebody from behind???you're at fault.

[LowThudd]

You hit somebody from behind???you're at fault.

That sums it up.

[Holden]

a. purchase an electric bike that only goes 68mph
b. ride it across the country
c. be on an interstate.

d. do it on the evening of November 26th, the deadliest night of the year.

P.S. accident = unintentional. Even if it happens via negligence (mech. failure/bald tire blowout?), it can still be an accident.

[corey]

You hit somebody from behind???you're at fault.

wasn't the case when i got nailed from behind in my cadillac by some broad doing 60 in a 35 around a blind corner.
i had turned out from a stop sign, so naturally she had the right of way, even though there was no way i could see her, and if she had been doing the speed limit (which her stuck speedometer, 2 foot skid marks, and obliterated minivan had indicated that she factually was NOT upon impact) would not have come around the blind bend so fast as to spread my cars ass-parts all over the road. that was totally my fault...

make the beast with two backsing pregnant dog.