News from California 11

[zdas04]

California passes new auto emission rules

This article is AMAZING. The regulators in California have mandated that 1.4 million electric cars be on the roads of the state by 2025. I tried to count the number of times electric cars were called "zero emissions" in the article and got to 8 before I lost count. One of the comments after the the article hit the nail on the head by saying "Electricity comes from coal and natural gas, why don't they call these cars 'coal fired vehicles'?".

Why do regulators insist on pretending that they can ignore the laws of nature?

David

 

[JohnRBaker]

Perhaps, but California also produces a aignificant amount of electricity from Wind (4,000 MW capacity), Geothermal (2,000 MW capacity), Solar (1,400 MW capacity) <could not find a figure for Hydroelectric>. Altogether, something over 25% of all electricity produced in California is from 'renewable' sources and I suspect that by 2025 this number will be significantly higher.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[jmw]

How do you mandate that 1.4 million vehicles will be electric?
Despite the number of models available and apart from the lovies love affair with Prius, actual sales aren't exactly something to write home about.

Of course, what they could do is give away a G wiz with every Hummer Sold.

There must be something that will be found that will enable owners to exploit some sort of residence in other states. Or special leasing deals. For example, Rental car companies buy so many cars that they are able to negotiate very low factory prices. They then rent them for a brief period and then sell them. The resale price of the used cars is below the low factory price they paid for them.
There must be some sort of out of state deal that would deliver the same. Possibly a car owners club operated by the car rental firms. You simply own the vehicle registered out of state until your time runs out.
California's politicians are no brighter than anyone else's. You have to wonder what the unintended consequences will be.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[zdas04]

Looking at the last data available The EIA shows that as of year-end 2009, California's Solar capacity was 450 MW, Wind was 2,650 MW, and Geothermal was 2,004 MW. That is capacity. It assumes that a solar panel works fine at night and there are no calm days. On the other side of the coin is consumption. That is reported in MW-hr so if I divide the reported number by 24 hours in a day and 365.25 days in a year those numbers drop to 73.8 MW, 662 MW and 1,466 MW respectively. Solar is 0.7% of the capacity and 0.3% of the consumption. Wind is 4% of the state's reported capacity, but only 2.9% of consumption. Geothermal is 3% of capacity and 6.3% of consumption.

Renewables are 26% of the state's consumption, but hydro and geothermal combined are 76% of that number (19.9% of total consumption). They aren't building any more dams, hell the Greenies want to tear the existing ones down. Large-scale geothermal seems to be built out, so somehow you have to parlay 6% of consumption into a resource that can supply "motor fuel equivalent" for 1.4 million vehicles. Not happening.

40 of 66 MW of capacity allocated to California comes from natural gas-fired power plants. This is due to a law that prohibits electricity from Coal plants from being used in the state--the law didn't cause a single coal-fired plant to close, it just caused apparent sources of power to move around. NIMBY says that the increase in conventional power generation that this bone-headed law requires will happen outside of California. My guess is that it will take longer to get water rights for cooling towers and EPA permits than is available to the people of the great state of California.

I just can't wait until a REALLY hot summer (the earth is warming, remember?) when everyone wants their AC on full blast and the police ban electric cars from the roads because their power consumption is increasing the shortage of power and the brownouts have become blackouts. I figure that will happen in 2012, 2013, or 2014. The 2025 goals are going to be tough to achieve in the face of that.

David

 

[beej67]

So what's the "punishment" if they don't meet their target? How enforceable is this?

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

Note that I was quoting what appears to be more recent numbers.

For example, in the case of Wind Power:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_California

For Solar Power (a figure which included both photovoltaic and photothermal capacity):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California

However, on checking it appears that the Geothermal number was a bit out-of-date, being from 2000 so that figure could be higher today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy_in_the_United_States

And in my reinvestigation I found data on Hydroelectric production, and as you see, the generation capacity in California is not insignificant, being greater for example than the 8 so-called mountain states combined. Only one other state produces more hydroelectric power and that's Washington state with their extensive series of Columbia River dams.

http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/hydroelec/hydroelec.html

So again, I make the point that by 2025, the total amount of renewable energy being produced in California could be very significant indeed.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[zdas04]

I like Wikipedia a lot, but when it comes to energy numbers in the U.S. (and to a lesser extent in the rest of the world), if the numbers didn't come from EIA, then somebody made them up. Energy numbers (actual readings) are reported to the states, but the states do a spotty job of making them available to non-government users (California is actually especially bad both in accesibility and update frequency). Federal regulations require the states to report the numbers to EIA. EIA compiles them and publishes them for all the world to use. The process is not terribly fast, but it is as reliable as any aggregation of mandated data ever is.

Non-EIA sources of energy data are made up of guesses, partial understanding of trends, and extrapolations. I work with energy data as a central part of my job. I look at a lot of it. It frustrates me that I have to wait 2 years to get data, but that is a fact of life. I've trolled the web and built some of those "guesses, partial understanding of trends, and extrapolations" data sets and when I got verifiable data I was never very close.

California does have significant hydro (13.6% of total consumption n 2009), a large part of that comes from their allocation of power from Hoover Dam (55.9% of 2,080 MW) and Glen Canyon Dam (power allocations not readily available), but they do have a large number of smaller dams in the Sierra Nevada's. When was the last time you heard about a new one being built? Wikipedia has a list of 24 major projects under construction and not a single one is in the U.S. let alone in California. I think you have to call hydro "base load".

David

 

[jmw]

I guess we should refer to the Smart Meters thread.
Do we assume that one of the actions they will be able to take is to shut down the car charging circuit?
Or will owners of electric cars be exempted from intervention?
What about those who don't own a car (assuming such individuals do exist in CA - I know it is usually the cue to ring 911 whenever anyone confesses to not owning a car or not being able to drive or who wants to pay cash for something, but there must still be some in CA who are not homeless people)? How do they establish their green credentials to the power companies and Al Gore?
Do they have to have car charging circuits installed and hook up stuff to charge so as to fool the smart meter system?

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

Perhaps, but Hydro does NOT depend on 'coal' nor other fossil fuels, so even if it's relative contribution diminishes over time, as other power sources come on-line, it will still be listed in the category of 'zero-emmisons'. And while it may be true to there are no new local hydro projects, there are many Wind, Photovoltic, Solarthermo and Geothermal projects underway in California as well as other Western and Southwestern States, with the first two technologies having the advantage of being able to bring capacity on-line in incremental stages without having to wait 10 to 15 years, or more, that a major dam construction project can take before the first KW of power is pumped into the 'grid'. And even the latter two technologies offers more flexibility and incremental opporunities then do singular generation operations such as hydroelectric dams, coal and gas fired power plants, nuclear power plants, etc.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[beej67]

Please link me to this 'smart meters' thread. They just installed one on my house, and I admit I was curious how 'smart' a meter really needed to be.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[jmw]

One is here.
I'm pretty sure there was another earlier thread but the Eng-tips search won't find it for me.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[jmw]

If I do a full site search I find this thread but I'm sure there is another in my forums.
Doing a full site search with Smart or smart plus as search terms will find you several different threads.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[moltenmetal]

As a commuter I'm looking forward to owning an electric car. In Ontario, electricity generation is 60% from nuclear and renewables and only 40% from fossil fuels, with that proportion getting even more favourable during the off-peak period when I would be charging my car.

As far as what regulators can demand, they can't demand that people buy one thing versus another. They can, however, prohibid the sale of things which don't meet the regulations, and they can put pricing pressure in the market to shift behavior in the direction they want it to go. Given that what they're after is a reduction in the emissions, including the CO2 emissions, from fossil fuel combustion for transport, the best way to give people the market feedback signal they need to make proper decisions would be a fossil fuel tax. That would make fossil fuels themselves more expensive, as well as making fossil-derived electricity more expensive as well.

 

[jmw]

Ontario sounds the place to be when Europe, with its obsession with renewables, runs into an energy crisis, the UK worst of all. Thanks Molten.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[zdas04]

MM,
You are dead right about that one. The European governments don't seem to do much that makes sense to me, but ramping fuel taxes up since the mid-1970's was an energy policy that has pretty much worked (people complain bitterly about it, but they have altered their energy consumption because the price was high enough to matter).

If Jimmy Carter's response to the Oil Embargo had been a dime tax on a gallon of fuel (that could increase every year), back when imports were under 10% of U.S. consumption, imports never would have gotten to 75%. We wouldn't currently be exporting a half billion dollars a day to purchase foreign oil. Cars would be smaller, and smarter. Long-haul trucks would from 50 years ago would not still be on the road because they couldn't compete with the effeciency of today's diesels. Instead our lovely govenrment put restriction after restriction (some of them even made sense) on the U.S. Oil & Gas industry and 3/4 of our motor fuel comes from imports. Fix that and the economy fixes itself.

David

 

[JohnRBaker]

OK, answer me this; what do you think of America's larget EXPORT right now being refined fuels? Or that the Keystone pipeline, if it's built, will not increase the domestic supply of refined fuels by one gallon since 100% of it's crude is destined for Gulf Coast refineries whose production is earmarked for shipment overseas to Europe and Asia?

BTW, there's a reason for BOTH of these situations; AMERICAN oil companies get an EXTRA tax break when they refine foreign crude and then ship it back out to a foreign buyer (remember, the oil coming out of a Keystone pipeline would be Canadian in origin). For federal tax purposes, the refining of the crude in this case can be carried on the books as if it occured OUTSIDE the US and therefore exempt from federal taxes. And yet the Right continues to complain about subsidies for companies in the renewable energy business.

After all, it's been over a hundred years now. Don't you think that American oil companies should be able to compete without having to depend on taxpayer money?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[beej67]

If Jimmy Carter's response to the Oil Embargo had been a dime tax on a gallon of fuel (that could increase every year), back when imports were under 10% of U.S. consumption, imports never would have gotten to 75%.

Oh come on now. Even if Jimmy had done that, Reagan would have undone it a couple years later.

One of the bad things about a 4 year election cycle is you can't plan more then 4 years ahead or you lose.

Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[JohnRBaker]

Oh come on now. Even if Jimmy had done that, Reagan would have undone it a couple years later.

Don't forget, after entering office Reagan immediately started to dismantle Carter's energy initiatives including going so far as to order that the solar panels, which Carter had installed at the White House, be removed AND DESTROYED. However, since they were technically government property some GSA official had them declared as 'surplus' and put in a warehouse instead. Years later they ended up at a college in New England where some of them are still in use to this day.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Just went out and got the Sunday edition of the Orange Co Register and on the front page was an article about Cal State Fullerton installing several electric car recharging stations in one of their parking garages, powered by a solar panel installation on the roof.

One of my classmates from engineering school just retired as head of the Financial Giving foundation for one of the community colleges up in Silicon Valley and one of his last programs he was responsible for was finding donations to help fund installing solar panels on virtually all the available roof area of the colleges buildings.

It's these sorts of siutations where technology like photovoltaics is ideal as it can be done in an incremental manner, as resources are available and it promotes energy production at the point of usage which in the end increases the overall efficiently of the proposition. There are virtually thousands of opportunities like this around the country where this approach could be leveraged. What we need is something like Germany's 'Million Solar Roofs' initiative which could a long way to reducing the dependency on fossil fuels and would increase the overall efficiency of the 'grid' since production will be geographically better integrated with where the energy is actually being used.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

UG/NX Museum:

http://www.plmworld.org/p/cm/ld/fid=209

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[FeX32]

Interesting thread.
As far as I know the only "pure" electric vehicle on sale now is the Chevy Volt. (correct me if I'm wrong).
I personally know one of the engineers that developed the battery management system. He mentioned it's life between 4-5 years max, with a substantial drop in life if the temperature varied even a degree south. There are multiple heat exchangers on the car just to cool the battery packs.
Battery technology will continue to be a bottle neck for electric cars. Unless of course we only keep our vehicles for 2-3 years and don't drive more then 300km on a trip.
The industry has to do a lot better then that if 1.4 million are foreseen as daily drivers. That's IMO.


Fe (IronX32)