“Then at night, you may be charging on on "fossil" power; but it's just getting back the power you "loaned" the grid by day.”
I’m not so sure about this. We do store some PV for use later, but where we can’t, that resource just gets curtailed (or we pay Arizona to take it). - Mark Sent from my Fuel Cell powered iPhone > On Dec 24, 2018, at 11:21 AM, Lee Hart <leeah...@earthlink.net> wrote: > > From: Mark Abramowitz via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> >> See the subject of the thread for the bottom line answer, though things are >> never as simple as a one-liner. > > That's for sure! It's not a simple problem; so there are no simple answers. > If anyone who has a simple answer, it's probably wrong. :-) > >> For someone who wanted to jump into the deep data, something I learned >> recently is that for those charging from the grid at night, the energy they >> are using is virtually all non-renewable (fossil). And I’m told that most of >> it is from fracked natural gas.(this is all California perspective - other >> areas use more coal on the grid) > > I can believe it. Power at night is going to come from the base load plants, > which are likely to be coal, hydro, or nuclear (or gas in CA). So where your > EV charging power comes from will depend on where you live. > > California isn't the center of the world; but it probably has the highest > concentration of EVs (at least in the US). It's ironic that much of the > state's EV charging power is coming from fossil fuels. > >> For those of you that are thinking that faced with this information, battery >> EV are not worth pushing any more (haha), I’ll say that you are still wrong. >> BOTH are still important, and needed. > > That's for sure! Electrons aren't traceable, and generation has to exactly > match consumption at every second. > > But you can have PV panels generate power during the day. You don't need it; > so it gets used by someone else on the grid. It reduces the amount of fossil > fuel that gets used by day. Then at night, you may be charging on on "fossil" > power; but it's just getting back the power you "loaned" the grid by day. > > To me, the fundamental problem is out infatuation with "monoculture" > solutions. Government and big business want one-size-fits-all solutions. But > everyone is different. We our situations are *different*, so we need to be > able to choose from different solutions that meet our individual needs. There > is going to be a place for hydrogen, batteries, wind, solar, and even fossil > fuels for a long time to come. It's just the balance between them that needs > to change. > > -- > Excellence does not require perfection. -- Henry James > -- > Lee A. Hart http://www.sunrise-ev.com > _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
